While I am sure many of you are already aware of this cool and useful tool, I thought I should write a post about it.

Aksharamukha, developed by Dr Vinodh Rajan, a Tamilian, Computer Scientist and researcher on Digital Paleography, based in Germany is probably the most useful tool when it comes to unicode-based text for various languages. For astika community, it is even more useful when we want to convert any scripture from Devanagiri(Sanskrit) to Tamil or Telugu or any language and vice versa.

I use this tool a lot daily! For Tamilians, it does a fantastic job of putting numerals to differentiate ka vs kha vs ga vs gha etc. To see this tool in full action, goto https://sanskritdocuments.org/sanskrit/raama/ and you will see on the right top of the browser, a little window, where you can choose target language for conversion. Once you choose that language, the whole page will be translated to that language. Pretty cool!

I have added that same widget on this blog now. You can see on the right top. This will help transliterate contents for your language of choice. For now, I have restricted the language conversion to Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Gujarathi. If I dont filter then it will list about 60+ languages around the world.

Also, you can visit http://aksharamukha.appspot.com/converter – to do conversion. This is what I use the most! You copy the text from any place and paste in that window to do the conversion.

Upon using a tool a lot, in some cases (not always), the Tamil conversion isn’t perfect from Sanskrit. In those, cases, I do it in 2 steps:  Devanagiri to Roman (Harvard-Kyoto)->Tamil.

This tool is a real blessing!

Enjoy the tool. If you like, remember to say thanks to Vinodh by paying whatever feels right to you! Also check out his page – http://www.virtualvinodh.com – didn’t know he is an ex-Cognizant guy!

Vinodh – Thanks for coming with this tool! Keep up the great work!

Disclaimer – I have almost moved out of reading Sanskrit material in Tamil. Hopefully soon I will move out completely.

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