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Transliteration Input Tools

Screen Recording

Google had their official input tools that supported transliteration that allowed people to type in languages like Nepali and Arabic using Romanized English which changed the way people typed in a lot of parts of the world. Unfortunately like most projects, Google decided to kill the API. Even though it is deprecated, the API still works, however it has a lot of bugs in different browsers and does not support SSL anymore which is pretty much a requirement for most web applications now.

I found out that the backend server Google was using is still alive and is being used by different production services like Google Keyboard for Android. I decided to recreate the client from scratch and use the same backend for transliteration.

Development

Use npm install to install all the required node packages. Then run npm start to start the webpack development server that has a test page, live reload, scss compilation, typescript compilation and everything needed for development.

Usage

Using this client is very simple. Simply include the transliteration-input.bundle.js from the dist folder in a script tag on the head of your document like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="./transliteration-input.bundle.js"></script>.

Add an input or textarea element in your body: <textarea id="transliteration"></textarea>

Then towards the end of your body tag, add the following to enable transliteration on any input or textarea element:

<script type="text/javascript">

let transliterationInput = document.getElementById("transliteration");

enableTransliteration(transliterationInput, "ne");

</script>

The second part of the enableTransliteration method takes the language code. The following language codes are supported:

ENGLISH: 'en'
AMHARIC: 'am'
ARABIC: 'ar'
BENGALI: 'bn'
GREEK: 'el'
GUJARATI: 'gu'
HINDI: 'hi'
KANNADA: 'kn'
MALAYALAM: 'ml'
MARATHI: 'mr'
NEPALI: 'ne'
ODIA: 'or'
PERSIAN: 'fa'
PUNJABI: 'pa'
RUSSIAN: 'ru'
SANSKRIT: 'sa'
SINHALESE: 'si'
SERBIAN: 'sr'
TAMIL: 'ta'
TELUGU: 'te'
TIGRINYA: 'ti'
URDU: 'ur'

You can also disable transliteration by calling disableTransliteration(transliterationInput); any time.

Building

Building is really easy, just run npm run build which will fire up webpack with proper production configuration and build the compiled version on the dist directory.

Testing

Currently, all the testing is manual. If anyone wants to contribute, automated UI testing would be a great place to do that. All pull requests are welcome.

Once all the dependencies are installed, if you run npm start it starts webpack-dev-server which has live reload, all the compilation and everything needed for you to test the application while developing on a browser.

Issues

Please submit issues through the github issue tracker.

Contributing

All pull requests are welcome. Here are some things that you could contribute to:

  1. Automated client side tests.
  2. Mobile compatibility. This library is not mobile compatible yet because there is no reliable way to handle text input events through virtual keyboards on phones. This is a work in progress but any contribution regarding this would be appreciated.
  3. Better configuration of the UI.

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Unofficial client to Google's Transliteration Backend

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