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Dhee Indic Transcriber
Every reader, in their own script.
A free WordPress plugin that lets every visitor read your site’s Indic text in the script they read. A Malayali who never learnt Devanagari reads your Sanskrit verses in Malayalam letters; a Tamil reader follows your Hindi post in Tamil; a Bengali reads a Telugu page in Bengali. The words stay the same — only the letters change.
What it does
The plugin adds a slim bar to the top of every page with two controls:
- Read in — Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Odia, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam or Roman. Every piece of Indic text on the page is rewritten in the chosen script, whatever script it was written in. English is never touched.
- Sanskrit mode — checked by default.
The choice is remembered, so a reader picks once and every page they open after that comes in their script. The bar stays on screen at every size, from phones to wide desktops.
Sanskrit mode
With Sanskrit mode on, every letter keeps its own vowel, the way Sanskrit is read: राम becomes Rama, and कमल becomes കമല. Turn it off and text written in Devanagari, Bengali, Gujarati, Odia or Gurmukhi is read the way Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Odia and Punjabi are spoken today: Ram, കമൽ.
Malayalam, the way it is printed
Malayalam has two ways of drawing the same letters: traditional, with conjuncts stacked into one shape (സ്കൃ in സംസ്കൃതം), and reformed, with a visible chandrakkala between them. Most phones show the reformed style, so the plugin draws Malayalam in Gayathri, a traditional-orthography font by Swathanthra Malayalam Computing, for readers who choose Malayalam. It is also written the way Malayalam is written: അമ്മ, ദില്ലി, ശങ്കര, പഞ്ച.
Install it
- Download the plugin (a .zip file).
- In your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins › Add New Plugin › Upload Plugin, choose the file, and install it.
- Activate it. The bar appears on every page straight away.
- Optionally, visit Settings › Dhee Indic Transcriber to choose which scripts readers are offered, the default script, whether Sanskrit mode starts checked, and whether the bar sits at the top or the bottom.
Needs WordPress 5.2 or later and PHP 7.2 or later. Works with page caching, because every visitor gets the same page and the conversion happens in their browser.
Privacy
The plugin collects nothing. The conversion runs in the reader’s browser, the page makes no requests to us or to anyone else, there are no cookies and no analytics, and your posts are never changed. The only thing it remembers is the reader’s own choice of script, kept in their browser.
What’s inside
- SreeVidya, DheeYantra’s transliteration engine, which breaks each word into its sounds and writes the sounds out in the chosen script. It runs as JavaScript in the browser.
- Gayathri, by Swathanthra Malayalam Computing, under the SIL Open Font License, for Malayalam.
The plugin is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 2.
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