There are many projects to do in Open Source for Tamil Computing.
Listing here some of them.
1. Font conversion to unicode
There are lot of Tamil fonts in TSCII and ASCII format.
TAM, TAB, Vanavil, Bamini, indoword, softview, kabilan, kaniyan, shri TAM, Shri lipi, ilango, mayilai, anu, senthamizh etc. These are used in DTP centers.
There are tons of documents generated in these fonts.
To view them, we need to install these fonts locally.
These documents should be converted to unicode so that anyone can view them without installing any special fonts.
NHM converter is a online service which does this.
We need to create a FOSS application for this.
We can do this in python, php, ruby etc.
we can do this as desktop or web application.
TACE format should be considered.
We can create a new spellchecker or extend the existing spellcheckers aspell or hunspell or project silpa.
grammer checker – santhi pizai thirutthi
Dictionary with tamil meaning, english meaning, opposite, same meaning words
Number to string converter
example: 100 = nooru
OCR for Tamil
The following are in beginning stage.
test and extend them.
A web application should be developed, showing a word and all the grammar tags.
Logged in users can select the relevant grammar tag for that word.
Thus, when many people contribute, a whole Tamil corpus will be generated.
Rule based auto complete for Tamil
automatic machine translation
GUI and web based Tools to learn tamil for beginners
Text to Speech for Tamil
test and enhance it
project for Wiktionary
Wikionary is the wiki based dictionary for all languages.
We can add voice files to wiktionary.
We need to create an web application, desktop and mobile client to display each word, asking the user to record the sound of the word.
once recorded, the sound ogg file should be uploaded to commons.wikipedia.org and then it should be linked back to the same word in the wiktionary page.
Thus, any user can record and upload the audio words automatically.
Some of the projects are discussed in the following research paper collection.
Engg college students who needs some base paper to their projects can use these papers and build applications on top of them.
Add your comments, if you have any more projects for tamil computing.