15919ify+

An open-source web utility designed to take in text in 7 Bit ISO 15919 format and transcode it into various Indic Scripts. While built with a modular architecture capable of scaling to multiple languages, it currently only has support for Malayalam, Tamil and Kannada (not fully ironed out). Current Malayalam setup is made taking huge liberties like introducing various character combinations not in the current standard (ie, chillu letters).

Features

• Scans input strings character-by-character, intelligently grouping multi-character consonant and vowel clusters (up to 3-character keys)
• Dictionary based mapping system covering all letters and symbols in Malayalam, Tamil & Kannada

The challenges

• The ISO 15919 standard was kinda dumb to start on, because it did not have a native way to express the “Chillu” letters found only in Malayalam, and thus, I had to add to the standard in order to even make Malayalam usable.
• I’m in India, so school already started in June, and so I had to do it all within the very little time I have (Boards..)

Prerequisites before trying it out

I suggest checking out the Github repo for typing instructions, beacause most of this is a weird concept so it might be better if you have an idea of how to even do anything. Also, I don’t think most of y’all know these Indic Scripts, so this is defenitely niche, but pretty helpful, becuase all generic tools I tried for the task were pretty bad with Malayalam’s specificity, and also the fact that there is NO tool currently that takes in any form of 15919 and gives a transliteration for Any non-Devanagiri language;