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Description
The use of native language for sharing views in writing has experienced explosive growth around the world in the past several years. This has been the case because of the rapid growth of Internet services round the globe. In developing countries in particular, internet and wireless mobile services have proved to offer a unique opportunity to service a wider subscriber base in the shortest possible time previously deemed unattainable. In addition to wireless voice, wireless data services have proved time and again to be of immense value to subscribers as well as wireless operators. Among these valuable wireless data services, nowa-days social networking based websites have proved to be an asset to the users for sharing their thoughts and ideas. There has been a growth in the software for offering the users to share content based on their native language. Now most of the Mobile operating systems offer Latin language support through which the user can input text in Latin languages, these include recently added Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc. For the users of Non-Latin languages like Devanagari script and writing system, no input method solution has existed so far in Android Mobiles. Therefore, there is a very visible and pressing need to introduce text editor in either Devanagari script or in a multi-script (Latin and Non-Latin both) environment specifically for the mobile smart phone platforms. Developing such an application, however, requires the scholarly investigation and eventual solution of a number of technical challenges. These challenges vary from developing an innovative keyboard board mapping for the more than 110 characters of the Devanagari writing system onto a 70-key virtual keypad to writing, a completely new input method editor (IME) for Devanagari script in a Java environment. Further, this will also involve addressing issues such as Unicode compatible standards and efficient character encoding schemes. It involves the study of Non-Latin script rendering techniques used in conjunction with the IME. It also includes the script sharing engine which detects the use of Devanagari script characters and read them correctly on the mobile platform. This thesis, therefore, is an original and formal scholarly investigation of these technical and script challenges to develop a working and testable Input Method Editor and Non-Latin script sharing applications in the Devanagari writing system. In this thesis, the core subject matter is addressed by providing additional detailed discussion to relevant technologies such as the Android application development environment (purely based on Java) and Unicode standards.
