Its been a month since I wrote my last post. Much of work has been happening around planning for Tech Ed India,
the upcoming Virtual TechDays this week as well as our Developer content at
the Great Indian Developer Summit 2010. Its going to be one exciting period starting this week and I am glad I would be able to meet a lot of folks who have written to me personally that they would like to catch up at Tech Ed India. For now, I had a chance to meet
the Microsoft India Development Centre team that worked on
the Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool (erstwhile Akshara).
The team updated me that they have also released
the scripts so that
the Indic input feature can be encapsulated into your own websites. For example, if you are having a web page where you collect user information, you can pretty much make your site indic aware i.e. accept inputs in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi etc., All you would need to include would be a bunch of scripts onto your web pages and you are ready to make it, like I said, “indic aware” I have built a sample web page that accepts First Name, Last Name, Address and an additional field. When it comes to accepting indic, sometimes, you may want to avoid
the indic input in certain fields and accept it in English. You can specify
the MicrosoftILITWebAttach="false" attribute to
the Text Boxes and Text Areas (TextMode=”Multiline” in ASP.NET) so that
the particular field automatically switches over to English input. Similarly,
the moment you specify that
the TextMode=”Password” to make it as a password field, it automatically ignores all indic recognition and shows
the masked dots for
the words entered. Note that, this is, when we are going for
the Opt-out mode, where we are specifying that by default all
the input controls would need indic awareness and we would specify for those controls where it is not required.
The other mode is Opt-in mode where you would need to add a different property to
the script definition i.e. attachMode=”optin” . When we do this, we need to explicitly add
the MicrosoftILITWebAttach="true" attribute for every control where we need indic input. I have created a sample web page which accepts First Name, Last Name, Address and an additional input field to demonstrate
the “Opt-out”. You can copy paste this into any of your web pages to check it <form id="form1" runat="server"> <!-- Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool embed code --> <input type="hidden" id="MicrosoftILITWebEmbedInfo" attachMode="optout" value="" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ilit.microsoft.com/bookmarklet/script/Tamil.js" defer="defer"></script> <div> <h2> Welcome to
the Registration Page </h2> <p> First Name: <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtFirstName" /> <br /> <br /> Last Name: <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtLastName" /> <br /> <br /> Password: <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtPassword" TextMode="Password" /> <br /> <br /> Address: <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtAddress" TextMode="MultiLine" Height="100" Width="200" /> <br /> <br /> English Text: <asp:TextBox ID="txtEnglishText" runat="server" MicrosoftILITWebAttach="false" /> </p> <p> <!-- Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool attribution image link --> <a style="text-decoration: none" href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=184205&clcid=0x409"><img style="border: 0px" alt="Transliteration by Microsoft" src="http://ilit.microsoft.com/bookmarklet/images/attribution.png"></a> </p> </div> </form> If you note
the code snippet above, I have included
the scripts in
the top with
the attachMode set to “optout” and for
the last TextBox, I have mentioned
the MicrosoftILITWebAttach="false” attribute to make it accept English input. Additionally, you also need to add
the “Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool attribution image” to your web page as a courtesy to
the team that developed this feature. It would basically add a image saying “Transliteration by Microsoft” similar to a Copy Right image. You can see
the screen shot below where I have typed it in Tamil. In that you will notice that
the password field behaves as expected and
the last field accepts English Text. You can also notice
the icon that comes in
the first textbox that indicates that,
the field is going to accept indic text. This sample is using Tamil, but you can pretty much do it for Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali etc.,
The website for getting
the Indic script and other instructions is http://specials.msn.co.in/ilit/WebEmbed.aspx?language=Tamil You can replace
the querystring value “Tamil” to other languages as mentioned above to
get the respective script. This also works for plain HTML based websites and doesn’t necessarily need you to use ASP.NET to achieve
the functionality. Note that, this form is not completely localized. This is transliterated. You can add label controls for FirstName, LastName indication etc., and use
the Visual Studio tools to localize and
get those values from resource files. In
the resource files, you can enter
the text in different languages to make this a truly localized page. If you just want to download
the Indic Tool Desktop version (that can be used for typing in Word, Excel, pretty much any input area), you can download it from http://specials.msn.co.in/ilit/ In
the same page, there is also a web version where you can type and
get text then and there if you dont want to install
the desktop version. So, go ahead, download / use them in your websites and enjoy
the power of Indic. Cheers !!!
