Acharya - Multilingual Editor for Indian Languages

Acharya is part of the open source IMLI project. Instructions for downloading the editor are here. It is a continuation of the work done in the Acharya Project at the Systems Development lab at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

Goals and Objectives

The long term aim of this project is to provide a framework and a set of software tools for text-processing in Indian languages. The first step in this direction has been to develop a cross-platform multilingual text editor - Acharya.

Features

Languages
Asamiya (Assamese), Bangla (Bengali), Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Oriya, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu
Keyboards
Inscript, Phonetic
File Formats
ISCII (default)
Export file format
Unicode Text, PDF, RTF
Platforms
Windows, Linux, Mac OSX

Acharya uses a syllabic coding scheme, consistent with the writing systems followed in India. This makes transliteration trivial, including support for Roman Transliteration and Braille.

Users

The single largest user of this editor is Eenadu Television (ETV) of the Ramoji Group, Hyderabad. This editor is being used in all of ETV's news channels. It serves as the primary document preparation tool for news scripts for all the above languages in ETV's Head Office in Hyderabad as well as over 120 branch offices located all over India.

People behind the project

The Acharya Project is the brainchild of Prof. R Kalyana Krishnan, Department of Computer Science, IIT Madras. The Open Source IMLI project was initiated by Ganesh Burra, when he was CTO of ETV. The editor was mainly developed by Indrani Roy and V. Krishnakumar with contributions from Ganesh. The project would like to thank the following people:

  • The entire staff of ETV News.
  • Linguists and language experts who have given us insights into languages and writing systems.
  • Special Thanks to Mrs. Meena Joshi and Dr. Francis Cooper of Modular Infotech, Pune for providing a set of free redistributable TrueType fonts for Indian languages.
  • Altruists International for providing Asamiya and Bangla fonts.