In 2004, typing in Indic languages was a challenging task, as transliteration tools were still in the early stages of development. As a personal passion project, I had developed a small utility for transliteration from English to Devanagari. At the time, I was working in my first job. I was given the opportunity to present my tool at a ‘Computer Society of India’ event, where I was the only individual participant. I still vividly remember how my manager encouraged me to participate and my company sponsored my entry fees. Despite my doubts about the reception of such a small tool, I followed my manager’s advice and presented it. The tool generated a lot of interest, and I received plenty of encouragement and feedback.
The tool I had created was quite rudimentary, relying mostly on rule-based mechanisms to generate Devanagari text, and still required some improvement. The transliteration of certain characters was still challenging using this tool, and I had written it in C# using WinForms and Grammatica (don’t remember why, feels like an overkill now) . In order for the tool to work, users needed a Unicode font that supported the Devanagari script.
The sense of excitement and accomplishment I experienced upon getting the tool to function properly in 2023 is indescribable.
I had also create a JAVA applet version of the tool (using my limited knowledge of JAVA) , which could be used to display Devanagari text on a webpage using Transliteration.
