Convergence

I love words and numbers; would love to just lose myself in a world of words and numbers.

Some words mean so much. Though it’s one’s mother tongue that touches your heart, we have got used to English or rather  Latin & Greek words for all learning.

The words synergy, symbiosis , convergence or the Zulu word Ubuntu mean much more than what a dictionary can indicate. Dictionary is good enough only to understand words like chair, table or wine. These special words challenge the normal linear thinking of one plus one adding up to two. These words indicate phenomena where 1+1 may not be just 2 but, 10, 100 or 1000 and 1000-1 need not be 999 but 900, 100 or even 0.

The numbers themselves are fascinating in that there is a world of difference between 01 and 10, that we just take for granted. Binary numbers in synergy with information technology takes the numbers to a totally different level. It is just two numbers 0 and 1 that are used to depict any sound, picture or text . Today all thoughts are expressed in 0s and 1s be it on WhatsApp , Instagram or a complete  movie.

Recently I started a personal project of converting Tamil books available in the public domain to more readable and user-friendly formats. By format here, I mean the layout as in normal English and also file format as in information technology. The idea did not kindle the kind of excitement even among voracious readers and writers as I myself experienced.  Now it looks obvious; all bibliophiles are not computer buffs and a person of either category may not be  a lover of languages (C++ or  php doesn’t count as language)

I love reading. I love Tamil . And I love Information technology.

It is the convergence of all three in a project that, I suppose , is  exciting!

The very idea of grappling with technology to render the Tamil script, displayed on different devices, to give a feel of reading a Tamil book, is so fascinating. How many people are aware of the complexities posed by Tamil script when two or three characters arranged in different ways , vertically or horizontally, together can mean , to what most people used to Roman script ,  as just one character  or one sound?

Talking of convergence, it is convergence of three that is special. In geometry, two parallel lines do not meet, (or converge at infinity). All non parallel lines meet at some point.

It is only when three lines converge at a point, the magic happens in geometry. In a triangle, the three medians meet at a point and it becomes  centroid, perpendicular bisector of sides meet and circumcentre happens , and angular bisectors meet at the incentre. 

That’s digression..

I just can’t understand people saying that a language is only for communication. If that be so, long back we would have settled for an artificial language that would have been more efficient , easier to learn and universal. 

 Whatever be, The confluence or convergence of Tamil, Computers and Books is pure bliss !

E-Books and Audio books

  The internet, to a great extent, has thrown open all resources to the world , to acquire knowledge. The days of intellectual tyranny are over. Anybody with time and inclination to learn, can learn just about anything, with no conditions attached. One is not disadvantaged by lack of money or lack of a teacher. … Continue reading “E-Books and Audio books”

 

The internet, to a great extent, has thrown open all resources to the world , to acquire knowledge. The days of intellectual tyranny are over. Anybody with time and inclination to learn, can learn just about anything, with no conditions attached. One is not disadvantaged by lack of money or lack of a teacher. One just needs to find time and anyone can emulate Eklavya, probably  the first student in a  virtual classroom; the net itself will act as the formless virtual guru.

I do not suggest that authors or teachers should be deprived of their livelihood or importance . They too need to pay their bills and they should be given due recognition for their contribution to the society. The importance of intellectual property rights just cannot be questioned. But simple joys of learning a language, reading classic literature, learning to play a musical instrument or software programming cannot be denied to anyone just because of lack of funds or lack of a school or teacher.

Today , we have plenty of resources on the net for learning anything from baking a cake to web designing. The resources are in the form of audio/video clips or ebooks in different file formats.

I am particularly interested in the contents originally created as printed books and are now downloadable as digital files.

A phenomenal effort has gone into digitization of every recorded thought that humankind has produced through ages starting from the first cave paintings . As information technology kept evolving earlier formats are now getting obsolete. But the beauty of working in bits and bytes is that any information once digitized in some format can be converted to any other format, without the need for retyping the entire contents.

We have a plethora of ebook readers ;devices and applications; Kindle, Kobo , Boox , Nook   and so on. One problem is that every device uses a different format for file system. For a price, you can get any book on any of your devices in any format.

But then , books are expensive , physical or digitized and that’s why we have libraries. There is an universe of books legally available in the public domain that just needs to be downloaded to your device. The problem is that most of these are in the form of pdf files. The pdf format owes its popularity, as its name implies, to the portability across platforms. Pdf also implies that the fonts size and margins are fixed . So the reading experience on hand held devices is not very good.

So, what we need is e-libraries storing digitized books downloadable in different formats . Particularly useful formats are Epub and mobi/azw  (used by Amazon Kindle) formats . If the contents are free to be accessed and are available in the public domain why should there be any restriction on which devices or applications to be used ?

There are a number of  free and paid applications available for reading digitized contents; Calibre, Eboox and  FBreader are some of the popular applications.

Of these, Calibre is a complete library rather than a reader app. It is so feature rich that it caters to all information requirements of a knowledge lover . It has a built in conversion tool for converting contents from any format to any other format; say from pdf to epub or mobi.

In case of Indic languages , there is one more layer of complexity added as converting from pdf to epub is not possible unless the text is created using unicode as against ASKII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) . For those interested in knowing the difference between ASKII and Unicode , here’s a link.

For displaying Tamil characters , earlier a system called (Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange (TSCII) ) Character Set. Any document created using this system cannot be converted to epub format. For that you need a newer encoding system.

In a layman’s language ,we need our eBooks to display the contents in easily readable way. The paragraphs should easily flow when fonts are enlarged or compressed. The margins should be adjustable. For all that there is a need for our techies to make the eBooks available at appropriate formats.

In this area I intend making a few good Tamil books available for readers in  user friendly formats. Please try out  https://sibha.in/books_world/   and https://sibha.in/books_world/public/tamil.php . I intend adding a title or two every day.

Cheers !