A note by Mihas Bayaryn, a Belarusian-English scholar: The phonetic keyboardlayout for devanaAgarI was developed using the program Keyboard layout Manager (devanagari inscript layout requires special character-marks on keyboard). Unicode format has its own defects but it is the only solution (it is really multilingual). There are some reasons for this. 1) Text in unicode is searcheable. 2) It is easy to format this text in many fonts (at this moment there about devanagari fonts for unicode, the best is Sanskrit2003). 3) It is easy to convert this text to other encodings (for example by Word macros). 4) Unicode text can contain characters in many languages (for example Belarusian English Sanskrit and many others at once). There are about 20 different indian encodings for devanagari (one font - one encoding). These texts are not sercheable, it is difficult to convert them in other encodings, and they support only devanagari and roman scripts (not cyrilic for example).
How does one use .dll and .msi files?
.msi file format is executable in WinXP - like all .exe files. And .dll file in <i386> directory is the library-file of keyboard layout.
To install this keyboard driver one has to:
1. unpack keyboard.zip file in one directory
2. run sanskrit.msi file
3. go to Control Panel > Languages and Regional Settings >
Languages > More > Languages and IME
4. then add Sanskrit as Language and Sanskrit Romanized as IME.
5. all is done.
To type devanagari in text-editor one also must have installed at least one unicode font which supports devanagari (Mangal, Arial MS Unicode, Sanskrit 2003, GIST-Yogesh and others).
Using <Alt-Shift> changes keyboard layout to Sanskrit and type.
Also try out other interfaces at http://www.aksharamala.com, Itrans online interface, Sanskrit bhaarat, and Itranslator linked above.
Some of the Sanskrit Documents and files may be available only in 'zipped' format which will require decompression programs before viewing --