Saturday, May 22, 2010

How well does this work?

ॐ 
श्री वक्रतुंड महाकाय कोटि सूर्य समप्रभा
निर्विघ्नं कुरु मे देव शुभ कार्येषु सर्वदा!
(
Meaning: The Lord with the curved trunk and a mighty body, who has the magnificence of a Million suns, I pray to you Oh Lord, to remove the obstacles from all the actions I intend to perform.)

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Should have played with Google transliteration before.  Didn't realize it was this easy.  Will have to see whether it is correctly displayed in all browsers, platforms, etc.  But Google used the power of the network to solve this problem of input of Hindi and other languages in a world dominated by ASCII keyboards.  To quote them:
This feature requires a live internet connection, as all the transliteration is done on Google's servers and sent back to your browser while you work on your message.
Basically they have a dictionary lookup.  So while it works well for Hindi, it will interesting to see how it does on Sanskrit.  The above I just typed in, haven't checked for errors.  Very promising!

PS: Rajan Parrikar sent in some corrections in the third pada.  Turns out it was easier to retype the third pada than to try to fix the few letters.  So it is not perfect, but still much easier than any of the alternatives I'm aware of.

PPS: Corrections from VN Muthukumar via Rajan Parrikar; fourth pada too!