Source: The Hindu
NEW DELHI, INDIA, April 14, 2002: India’s President, K.R. Narayanan, today released Tamil Word-2001, a Tamil word processor developed by Tamil Arasi, at a ceremony held at Rashtrapati Bhavan here. While a copy of the word processor was presented to the President by M. Natarajan, Editor, Tamil Arasi, the Editor of Viduthalai Tamil Diary, K. Veeramani, received the first CD ROM, which has been described as a “milestone in the development of Tamil as a scientific language.” At an audio-visual presentation, it was stated that the word processor was aimed at facilitating the work of the common man in the language known to him. In a note circulated at the venue, Dr. Natarajan said the development of word processors like MS-Word in English had influenced and compelled Indian languages to get into the process of modernization. Such facilities were essential for the survival of any language in the present century and in the Tamil language, too, there had been significant advancement in standardizing fonts and keyboards. While editing facilities and incorporation of language tools are yet to be perfected, the word processor provides software in Tamil, including fonts, editors and language tools similar to MS Works, Word Perfect and Word Star. The Tamil Word 2001 provides for user-friendly keyboards in Roman, Roman-Tamil, Tamil Typewriter and Tamil Net 99 and 15 different fonts besides editing facilities including Mail Merge, toggle between Tamil-English and English-Tamil calendar conversion. The software has a wide range of language tools such as spell-check, grammar check, “Sandhi” check, sorting, indexing, conversion of numbers to letters and vice-versa, transliteration (Tamil-Roman) and dictionaries.