Kaveri : Malayalam's Open Office Dreams

Kaveri is an open source project by Centre for Linguistic Computing Keralam, a joint venture of Computational Linguistic Team @ C-DIT, Kerala State IT Mission and Dept: of Linguistics- University of Kerala for research development production and dissemination of Malayalam Language Technology. Kaveri is software, which used Unicode fonts and is intended (not restricted) to use to help in word processing task.

What is in offer?

• Open Office suite in Malayalam
• Malayalam Spell checker
• English Malayalam translator
• English Malayalam Official language dictionary
• Translation helper to other South Indian languages and Hindi.

Malayalam open Office is promoted to speed up the e-governance programme in Kerala. And the government has given instructions to all govt. offices, PSU’s and Local Self Government Institutions in the state to use the open office suit. Don’t know whether the Govt. servants have taken it seriously or not.

This version of the Open Office with Kaveri is having the entire menu, directions, instructions and help in Malayalam. File is named as രേഖ (Rekha) New is termed as പുതിയത് (Puthiyathu) etc… these terminologies will be a little alien to those people who are using MS Office , but will gradually get used to these terms easily. The UI (User Interface) can be easily changed from Malayalam to English and vice Versa.

Kaveri can be used instead of the MS versions of Excel, Power Point, and Word etc… The English to Malayalam translation, translation service to other languages etc are very helpful for us, (especially if you are a blogger, blogging in Malayalam language). This is the first step in making a complete language Dictionary in Malayalam. Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Hindi languages can be translated with this easily, and supports Mozhi Keyman in this.

So this supports these phonetic applications and the inscript products. The articles/ matter typed in this can be saved as an open office document, MS office document, PDF document or even Rich Text document. (I’ve even tried the normal Txt, saved as utf-8).

Open Office capabilities.

Open Office is capable to create produce many a type of Applications, media, ads, etc... We can embed even a movie file into this.

How to install

The GNU GPL licensed version of Kaveri is available in http://www.clickeralam.org/ . The FAQ and the answer to your other questions are available in intelli assistant. Any one who is not having business view on this software can take a copy of this and redistribute. The Copy right remains with the Govt. of Kerala.

The future of Kaveri rests in your hands. Government have sought your help in matters regarding the translation, Phonetics and alphabets checking etc of the software. If you have any suggestions then you can get in touch with Linguistic Computing Keralam, and they will include the same in the coming upgrades and versions.

Come in; let’s embrace the beautiful world of openness and freedom

* This is an unofficial post to introduce you to one of the open source software called Kaveri, translated from the blog post of Kannuran . Malayalam is one of the languages spoken in India (in the state called Kerala).