RIT stands for Rice Inverse Transliterator. rit is a program that takes Telugu text typed using English alphabet and English text and prints Telugu and English appropriately. It determines English text from Telugu text by itself. It provides an optional transliteration and translation services for some English words. It also corrects spelling errors in Telugu to a limited extent. rit assumes that you follow the Rice Transliteration Standard for representing Telugu using English alphabet.
It is currently configured as a front-end to TeluguTeX, but it doesn't assume you have installed TeluguTeX. rit runs on Unix machines that have LaTeX installed on them. However, you don't need to know how to use LaTeX. You will ideally run rit on X (open) windows, although windows are required only to preview the documents before printing them.
The Rice Transliteration Standard (RTS) is not a software. It is merely a way to represent Telugu information using English alphabet. The Rice Inverse Transliterator (rit), on the other hand, is a piece of software. It is a program that takes transliterated Telugu text and prints it. In this sense, rts can viewed as a specification to a software, whereas rit is one particular piece of software that tries to meet the rts specification (see Q 22). That is why rit and RTS are terms that cannot be used interchangeably. Both rit and rts are still evolving.
The official source of rit is the anonymous-ftp site cs.rice.edu [128.42.1.30]. This program is what we (Ananda Kishore and Rama Rao Kanneganti) maintain. Since it is easy to change rit (the shell script or the data base), it is likely that several mutated copies of rit float around. But when we (AK and RRK) refer to rit, it is the version on the above ftp site that is referred to.
To get this software, you need to type the following:
% ftp 128.42.1.30
Type anonymous at the Name prompt and your userid at the Password
prompt. Then,
ftp> cd public
ftp> binary
ftp> get rit20.tar.Z
ftp> quit
% uncompress rit20.tar.Z
% tar -xvf rit20.tar
% cd rts
% more README
If someone else on your system has already installed rit, you don't have to install it again. All that you need to do is to set one variable in your .cshrc as follows:
setenv TELHOME /home/subbayya/telugu
assuming rts/ is found in /home/subbayya/telugu. If you still have any trouble with running rit, read rts/README.
If you are installing rit in your directory, please see rts/README and rts/doc/installation. These files give some help on installing rit, in case there is any problem. However, since file systems and configurations change from machine to machine, it is impossible to offer help for every conceivable trouble. So, "README" and "installation" are necessarily small. If you still have trouble installing rit, you should get *local help*, from within your institution. Try to get help from a local guru who knows how to use LaTeX software, how to set environment variables, and understands Unix shell scripts.
rit is in public domain. You can distribute rit at your will to others, provided you place no restrictions on their right to distribute it in turn. You don't have to mention the source, but it is perhaps better that your friends obtain rit from cs.rice.edu [128.42.1.30], for rit at that site is periodically updated. Please read Copyright notice in rts/doc as well as rts/rittex/CopyrightLong.
rit, by invoking another program called LaTeX, creates an appropriate file with .dvi extension. (filename.dvi or tmpin.dvi). This file can be printed on a laser printer by running another program on it. See the section "How to print a file" in this manual.
The margins are actually wider than they look. While displaying, we suppress the margins to fit more text in the window. If the wider margins in the print-out are still too small for you, see Q13.
Change your name :-) :-) (Just kidding!) Our data base for names is currently small. When rit does not find your name in its data base, it prints it in Telugu. The easiest way to overcome this is to enclose your name between two #s, like this: #Sannajajayya# or to insert a line like this in your input file:
%[name Sannajajayya sannajaajayya]
Once this line is there in your file, Sannajajayya is a name, with sannajaajayya as its transliteration.
See the section "Forcing Telugu to English and vice versa" and "Advanced features" in this manual.
This time rit must have found that name in its data base. It prints the names in its data base in English, by default. Its data base is case-sensitive. This means, Srinivas and srinivas are different. As an example, "Subba Rao" will be in its data base, but "subba rao" won't be; neither will "subbaa raavu". rit prints Subba Rao in English and subbaa raavu in Telugu. Normally, if you want your name in Telugu, you should avoid using capital letters in your name. If that does not work, just enclose your name with an underscore _ like this: _Subha_. Another way is to use comment environment, if you are likely to use this name again and again. See the section "Forcing Telugu to English and vice versa" and "Advanced features" in this manual.
Just enclose that piece of text between #s, like this: #mana#. See the section "Forcing Telugu to English and vice versa" and "Advanced features" in this manual.
Just enclose such word within underscores, like this: _are!_. In this region, spell-correction is turned off. See the section "Forcing Telugu to English and vice versa" and "Advanced features" in this manual.
It is not. Its typesetting is based on LaTeX software. If you are not familiar with LaTeX and want to insert figures, tables, or want to change page style etc, there is little you can do. See "Using LaTeX commands" section above.
This is difficult to do, unless you know how to use LaTeX software. See "Using LaTeX commands" section above.
This is not too difficult. Play with the file rts/rittex/begintex.
TeluguTeX, on which rit is built, has a variety of fonts. We are, deliberately, not making use of TeluguTeX's wide array of fonts. But to get boldface, large size, italics, underlining in English, there is a way - if you know how to use LaTeX software. See "Using LaTeX commands" section above.
Nothing much, unless you know how to use Metafont program. If you are motivated to redesign a few letters yourself using metafont, you should first obtain the whole TeluguTeX package, which is in the public domain (anonymous ftp address: 128.95.200.1, in pub/tex/telugu/). We have included only one font file of TeluguTeX, and not included its Metafont code. You should get the Metafont files and edit them yourself.
This is currently not possible with rit. But we hope that it will be possible in future. We also hope that our software inspires others to develop more sophisticated public-domain software. [There are transliteration-based commercial packages that display Telugu as you transliterate.]
This answer is for reasonably experienced users of LaTeX only. Others may skip this. Of course, you are interested in knowing if there is a short cut to editing the LaTeX file filename.tex. There is; rit accepts most of LaTeX commands. Please see "Using LaTeX commands" section above.
Spell-correction in Telugu is a difficult task, for many reasons. The primary reason is that in Telugu several words are combined to form one large word such as in "ne'nocce'sintarva'taina'sare'." This makes it unrealistic to have a "dictionary" with billions of such combinations of words. rit's spell-correction is rule-based. It works reasonably well on short words, but performs poorly on long ones. Automatic breaking up of a word when there are no spelling errors itself is difficult, not to speak of breaking up when the long word is replete with errors. Of course, the less you agglutinate words, the more rit can help.
Spelling correction is a complex task. While trying to correct errors, rit can sometimes - hopefully very rarely - introduce errors. These can come about by an unlikely but grammatically correct sandhi that we didn't foresee or by the use of an archaic word that we gambled rit would never see. The rules on which rit's spelling correction is based are not applicable for poetry. So, you should turn off spelling-correction in a poetry environment. We could do this automatically whenever you declare poetry environment (by typing a vertical bar |), but we don't do this for other reasons.
Please be cautioned that rit's spell-correcting is very limited. See the section "Common typos" in this manual.
The data base for proper names is a file rts/ritdata/proper. There is another program "update" in the same directory which you can run to update the data base. (You may have to type "chmod +x update" the first time you use it.) Just type "update proper" and on the subsequent lines, type one proper name (first letter in upper case) and its Telugu transliteration (in RTS ) per line. When you are done press CTRL-D.
The data base for English-to-Telugu dictionary is a file rts/ritdata/engteldict. You update this in the same way as above by typing "update engteldict" and typing one English word, its transliteration and Telugu meaning (in RTS ) per line.
However, when you send your file to someone else, their rit program wouldn't know about this update. But there is a simple way to communicate with rit programs at another site; see "Advanced features" section in this manual.
This is difficult to do, unless you know how to write a "sed" script. Moreover, spelling correction is involved, often resulting in unexpected results elsewhere. It is perhaps better avoided unless you are sure of what you are doing. But if you must add to the spell-correction data base and can write sed scripts, edit rts/.ritprog/simpwrd or rts/.ritprog/endwrd or both.
Use \& and \$ in place & and $. rit doesn't conform to the Rice Transliteration Standard in this respect: in printing the special characters (#, @, %, &, ~, _, ', ^). Please see Q22.
Almost. But not quite. rit doesn't meet RTS specification completely. The difference is perhaps immaterial to most users. Recall that RTS has some special characters ( #, @, %, &, ~, _, ', ^) which have special meaning. RTS also specifies how to print these special characters. If you want to print these using rit version 1.0, you may not be able to do so. Typing \&, \% prints & and % respectively. Typing @ by itself (blanks on either side) prints @. The rest of them cannot be printed, unless you are willing to edit the LaTeX file rit generates.
rit version 1.0 gives more importance to using LaTeX commands freely in its input than to conforming to RTS in printing the special characters.
We invoke the spell program only once, on the entire file. This part of the program is no slower than running a spell-check on an English document which many word-processors normally do.
TeluguTeX is a public domain software for typesetting Telugu asnd English, built on top of LaTeX. It was developed by Lakshmi Mukkavilli and Lakshmankumar Mukkavilli. Our program rit is built on top of TeluguTeX; that is, rit is currently configured as a front end to TeluguTeX. You can get TeluguTeX by anonymous ftp from 128.95.200.1 (in pub/tex/telugu/).
We added support for reading news and mail. The new release comes with improved spell checking also. We added the concept of a Telugu region--the region enclosed in "_"(underscores). Previously underscore defined a region of one word following the underscore.
When you type Telugu text using English alphabet, it is you who does the transliteration. rit takes the transliterated text and prints it in Telugu: it is the inverse operation of what you have done. That is, you transliterate and rit inverse transliterates.
There is a university down south by that name. We both are students at Rice. That's why.