Swathanthra Malayalam Computing (SMC) developed open source Indian language input keyboard application for Indic Keyboard now supports 23 languages from Asia in its latest version, the non-profit said on its blog. Now the Android application can support Assamese, Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Manipuri, Maithili, Marathi, Mon, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santali, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Started in 2012, the app was initially developed by Jishnu Mohan as part of his androidtweak.in project, and later several other coders contributed to it. Version 1.0 of Indic Keyboard was supported by DIT R & D Project undertaken by International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS), Govt. of Kerala. It was released on Play Store in April last year. The company now claims over 168,000 downloads on the Play Store. The new keyboard in addition to phonetic, inscript and transliteration layouts also has a compact keyboard layout which allows users to type Indian languages without the shift key. The latest version of the app has a number of tweaks and some of them are: - A new Setup wizard to make it simpler for users to get started. - Intelligent word suggestion for transliteration which helps typing faster with fewer keystrokes. - For languages with complex letters the app now has the ability to type ZWJ and ZWNJ characters directly. - Design changes and users can now choose between four themes. - A number of bug fixes which can be found on Github. Tamil Unicode PIL Users will also remember that a public interest litigation (PIL) was…
