Type anywhere on Windows using the Nudi keyboard layout, without using hacky font replacements and facing glitchy text. It uses the native Windows keyboard layouts feature to type Unicode Kannada text.
The only thing different from normal Nudi is that the vowels – which could usually be typed using a, e, i, o, or u have to be typed by using Ctrl + alt (as in, ctrl+alt+a etc.)
Download for Windows (Source code, open in Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator)
Download Old Nudi text to Unicode converter (or, download the Source Code)
Both are made by me.
[NOTE: the old Nudi text to unicode converter may be shown as a virus. It is a false positive and not a virus, you can check the source code if you want to. I cannot fix this unless I spend tens of thousands of rupees, which I don’t want to.]
After downloading the file, extract it and run nudi-unicode1.0.exe.
What is different between this and Nudi?
Nudi was written in an era when there was no way to represent Indic language characters on the character set of the time, ASCII. Nudi works by assuming certain ASCII characters from foreign languages, which are not used in India frequently, to be Kannada characters, and the special fonts supplied with Nudi shows the glyphs (picture of each character) of these foreign characters to be Kannada characters. These means ‘Nudi text’ can only be seen when used with the Nudi fonts. This is why Nudi text cannot be read on web browsers, smartphones, and parts of the word processor (for example, the find and replace tool, the save and open file dialog box, etc.)
The Unicode Consortium had added support for Kannada in Unicode from its very first release itself, in 1991. Windows has had support for Unicode (UTF-16) since Windows NT, released in 1993. There is no reason for anyone to use the old Nudi system anymore.
Linux-based operating systems have supported using the Nudi keyboard layout (called ‘KaGaPa’ after Kannada Ganaka Parishat) to type in Unicode Kannada since 2013.
This software allows use of the Kannada ‘KaGaPa’ or Nudi layout on Windows using the native keyboard language options.
[I had to use Ctrl+alt+[vowel] for typing vowels because there is no other way to do it.]
