A Kannada Editor for English Keyboards. website

When making subtitles/titles for yakshagana videos, I face this constant problem of writing kannada using english keyboards. Most of the online solutions transliterate by sending the word you’ve typed in english to google translate and suggesting the closest kannada word in the kannada script.

This is an OK solution, but many a time, it is not accurate, it struggles with old kannada words. It also does not provide character level control over the script, which makes it very hard to edit incorrect suggestions.

One more usecase (which interests me in particular) is writing Tulu in the kannada script. Tulu has viramas in the middle of words. For example, take the phrase ಶುದ್ಧ ಮನಸ್‌ಡ್. There is a virama after the ಸ. This is very difficult to write with any of the existing online editors. In unicode, you would need to use the ZWNJ (U+200C) to ensure that the ಸ and ಡ don’t get combined into a ottu akshara.


Here’s what I did:

  • Simple key map from english letters -> kannada letters.
  • key map is always on display for reference.
  • \ is used to represent a forced virama, which will help writing tulu.
  • Here are a few examples:
    • manas\D -> ಮನಸ್‌ಡ್
    • pRthvi -> ಪೃಥ್ವಿ
    • kannaDa -> ಕನ್ನಡ
    • kaartaviiryaarjuna -> ಕಾರ್ತವೀರ್ಯಾರ್ಜುನ


Here’s what it looks like, try it out, let me know if it helps! website screenshot

Few things to note:

  • the virama symbol represents the indefinite vowel ụ. As per this source, we don’t really need a separate letter for virama in Tulu.
  • Currently, this editor does not support a way to represent ụụ.