Basic Usage

• Double click on the Varamozhi Editor icon on Desktop

• When Varamozhi is started, a black debug window pops up first. Do NOT type anything in this debug console. Soon after that, a white backgrounded window will open. This white window will have two parts.

• Type in Manglish as per Mozhi transliteration mapping in the left window. You should see Malayalam in the right window.

• If you close the black debug window, Varamozhi editor will get closed and your unsaved work will be lost. So don't do anything with the black debug console window until you are done with Varamozhi Editor.

• If there are any problems, please search for solution in this help section.

• If you couldn't find a solution, please join the Varamozhi mailing list and post your question.

• If that is too much a hassle, please send me an email to my gmail.com id 'cibucj'. My response may be bit slower compared to mailing list route.

Edit operations like copy, paste and select all

Somebody pointed out that we cannot use Ctrl-A to select all in Varamozhi windows. That is true. However, one could right-click to get a popup menu which lists various edit operations including copy, paste and select all. Also, ctrl-c, ctrl-v and ctrl-x do work as expected.

By accident, I discovered that Ctl-/ (Control foraward-slash) selects the entire content in the window.

This Tk Manual describes various other control commands possible in the editing window.

Use of Lock Mode

You can lock so that only the manglish->Malayalam conversion takes
place and not the Malayalam->manglish one. (You can unlock it, if you want to paste some Malayalam and convert it to Manglish).

What is the big deal about this? An example: Assume, Malayalam->manglish is not locked. If you type ,"van", to get "വന്‍", Manglish-Malayalam translator recognizes it as an English word, and translates it as if you typed "വാന്‍". In order to avoid this, you can use "van#", which will be translated as വന്‍ in Malayalam window. So far so good. But if you click in the Malayalam window by accident, it will translate it back to "van" (and not van#) in the manglish window, which will be converted to "വാന്‍" (and not "വന്‍")!

Conversion from one font to another

Say someone wants to convert an article in Kerala font to Matweb font. These are the steps to follow:

1. You might want to install varamozhi with additional font support checked
   
2. Set varamozhi font to Kerala
3. Set the Lock to Unlocked state
4. Then copy paste the text in Kerala font in the right side Malayalam window
5. Change the font to Matweb

Steps to convert an article in deepika.com to Unicode:

1. You might want to install varamozhi with additional font support checked
   
2. Set Varamozhi editor font to ML-TTKarthika
3. Set the Lock to Unlocked state
4. Then copy paste the text from deepika.com in the right side Malayalam window
5. Select File > Export to Unicode (UTF-8)

Transfer text from Varamozhi Editor to another application

Suppose you were writing with Matweb font in Varamozhi Editor and wants to transfer that text to Microsoft Powerpoint. Just copy the text from Varamozhi Editor's right window and paste to Powerpoint. In powerpoint, select the copied text and change the font to Matweb.

It is always recommended to use Unicode for any kind of Malayalam texts. For this, do File > Export to Unicode. Then a browser window will pop up. Copy that Malayalam text to Powerpoint. No need to set the font.

Still better way is to use Mozhi Keyman and write the text in Powerpoint itself.

Sending Varamozhi documents

If you and the recipient has Unicode setup, then get the document in Unicode by changing the font to AnjaliOldLipi. Copy the Malayalam text to your mail application and continue as if you have English text.

If you can't go via Unicode route, choose one of the following options:

Export the document to HTML using File menu. Internet Explorer(IE) will open with the exported content in varamozhi-exported-tmp.html. Now there are different methods one could adopt:

1. Send this HTML document itself, if the person has the Malayalam font.
2. Send this HTML document and the font used. Ask the receiving person to install the font before opening the document.
3. Open this HTML document in MSWord. Save As .doc document with Embed TrueType fonts checked in the Options of 'Save As'. Don't check the 'Embed only the characters used'. Send this MSWord document.
4. Redirect your printer to a PDF file using CutePDF writer. This is my prefered method if the recipient does not have a Malayalam font.
   
5. Send as an image. Export to TIFF file using 'save as MDI' option in Office2003. Otherwise capture tools like Mr. Capture could be used. Last option would be use print screen (alt+Print screen) key and paste&crop that in any image editing tools like Gimp.

Saving or printing edited Malayalam document

Convert to HTML through File menu. Then an Internet Explorer will pop up with the exported document. Print or Save through Internet Explorer's File menu. You can open the saved document in text editors like MS Word.

Changing the default behaviour of the editor

Default configuration can be changed in varamozhi-config.pl residing in system temporary directory. System temporary directory is typically C:\Windows\Temp or C:\Documents and Settings\Your User Name\Local Settings\Temp or C:\Users\Your User Name\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Varamozhi Editor (in vista). (You can quickly reach the temp directory by typing in %temp% in the windows Run dialog or in any windows explorer address/location)

Useful configuration values in a sample file looks like this:

# refresh period in seconds for exported HTML/Unicode page
$refreshPeriod = 10;

# height of the window in characters
$height_chars = 15;

# width of Malayalam window in characters
$mwin_width_chars = 30;

# width of Manglish window in characters
$ewin_width_chars = 30;

# extra arguments to be passed down to varamozhi conversion executable
# those extra arguments are:
#   -b for disabling dictionary lookup
#   -h for html output
#   -u for unicode output along with malvi_mozhi_unicode
#   -f to get the font name
#   -g to enable debug output
#   -r to allow dot style r-chillu

$extra_args        = "";

This file is in Perl format.

Font conversion recipes

From Unicode to Manglish

From ISM to Unicode