Indian Language Proofing Tools

If you’re an Office XP user, you’ll find this an interesting add-on. Called the Indian language proofing toolkit, it let’s you use various Office XP applications in ten Indian languages, namely Hindi, Gujuarati, Konkani, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Sanskrit, Punjabi and Urdu. Some prominent languages like Malayalam and Bengali are missing though. The package has two CDs containing the Proofing Toolkit and additional Indian language functionality. Installation is in two-parts, with the language component added first, followed by the addition of specific languages and their typewriters to the Office XP language pallete. We tested this on a Windows XP machine with of Office XP. It can also work on Win 2000.

Most Office XP tasks and some in the OS can be performed in any of 10 Indian languages. At the OS level, you can perform searches and find Hindi filenames. An Office XP language toolbar attaches itself to all your Windows applications, giving you the choice of addressing the window in any of the ten Indian languages. Inside Office XP, you can create documents, templates, spreadsheets, presentations and databases in the language(s) of your choice. You can further extend your desktop to the web by publishing these files. We deployed one such HTML file on a msnusers website, and didn’t find any discrepancies. 

On to Office XP, you can use all standard Edit menu commands like copy, cut, paste, and even do find and replace all. It also has dictionaries to do spell checks, and even autocorrect lists for each language. It can insert date and time entries in Hindi in this version. You can also number pages in Hindi, by alphabet, number, and even by words. Page numbering is not available for other Indian languages. 

One drawback in the toolkit is that by default, you get only four typefaces for Hindi and two for the rest. These are all generic, Opentype fonts. Most of the table features in Office XP are supported in all 10 languages. Noteworthy of the lot are the sort and function tools. One advantage in Office XP is the ability to combine and use more than one language in a single document. This works throughout except for the sort function. While you can sort by the first letter of a column or by numerical data, it does not apply across languages. It happens with one language at one time, starting with English, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and so on. 

One serious disadvantage is the lack of support for performing arithmetic functions with numbers written in an Indian language. The exception to this is with the Functions tool in Word that can be applied to all languages. Understanding all of the above will have you looking for help files, which unfortunately are few and inadequate. The other CD in the pack contains a couple of resourceful applications for those who aren’t comfortable using an Indian language keyboard. One of them is webdunia, a phonetic typewriter, which allows transliteration of whatever you type in. It allows you to type Hindi words in English.

If you’re keen to learn how to use the language keyboards, there is MS Visual Keyboard. With this, you can toggle between different language keyboard layouts. The CD also has 500 different auto-templates for Hindi alone for letters, reports,

Powerpoint presentations, calendar wizards, resumes, etc. 

The Bottom Line. A useful tool for people who want Indian language support directly in Office XP. 

Priya Ramachandra at PCQ Labs