Hi! I was very surprised to see that Nitesh brought this topic to
public attention and I never noticed it. When I googled
"saral nepali keyboard", the keyboard I every designed
for the unicode typing considering various factors, I was
excited to find this link here at WNSO.org. Thanks to
Nitesh.
The version 4 of the Saral Nepali Keyboard has already
been implemented in GyaNeX online typing software.
You can see it at http://www.iGya.com/
In this new version there were several updates made
to release the special characters. Despite effort I
could not release { [ }] ; ' " characters. But,
others are now released and you can type
without getting interfered by nepali keyboard. The
"&" also was released and it becomes OM only
when it is a lone character, because Om never
comes with other characters in Sanskrit characters,
so you can use & to create special characters.
By release forward slash and backward slashes
we can create escape sequence and write a function
that handles escape characters as you type.
There are some reshuffling of the position of characters
after my personal experience with the earlier positions.
What is good with Saral Nepali Keyboard is that you
don't have to remember each barah khari' position.
I tried to make as minimum as and very similar to
Remington keyboard. Well, when I was in grade 8
at Chitwan Highschool, I learned typing and history
of typewriters. I somewhat realized that we needed
some easier way of typing Nepali in unicode. Thus,
you can find an online software, named "GyaNeX",
and I was dumb enough not being able to find
some genious new name and ended up using my
own name, apology for that, especially with those
who are annoyed by such intrusion of personal name
in a noble project.... K garne!
Well, if you want to read articles that are based on preeti or
most of the nepali TTF fonts, I have also presented
a solution at http://www.iGya.com/preeti/
You can just copy and past the preeti or other nepali
fonts and click the buttons, you will find unicode Nepali.
So, you can convert your old preeti font based documents
into unicode nepali. Not only that you can also read newspapers
or other articles written in preeti, using your university's
computer where you are not permitted to install preeti fonts.
What you do is just go to your website, e.g. NepaliPost.com
and copy the unreadable characters (because of lack of
appropriate fonts), paste them into my http://www.iGya.com/preeti/
online converter webpage. You are done. You can read it.
Thats what many people complained and I came up with
this simple solution. Now, you don't need to worry about
whether the computer you want to use has preeti font or
not. Forget about preeti or other TTF based font. You life
is much easier without preeti fonts. Well, if you are
still addicted to preeti font based keyboard, don't worry,
you can type in preeti font based keyboard and convert
to unicode nepali using these online softwares.
Good Luck. If someone finds this posting as if advertisement,
I apologize. I just wanted to give inside story on this thread.
GyaNeX