The rit (Rice Inverse Transliterator) software is simple to use. (Don't be intimidated by the size of this manual, most of it can be skipped on the first reading. We do not expect anyone to read this manual completely.) This manual assumes that rit is installed successfully and is ready to run. For further help in installation, read rts/README and rts/doc/installation.
What is rit?
rit is a typesetting software with the following capabilities:
1. distinguishing English words from Telugu words.
2. translating some English words into Telugu.
3. transliterating some English words into Telugu.
4. correcting spelling errors in transliterated Telugu.
5. dynamic declarations and updating the data bases.
To run rit you need --
To understand rit's spell-correction, type "rit typos" and compare the output with that of "rit -s typos". Notice that rit corrects spelling errors, by default.
To see how LaTeX commands are used in the input to rit, see ltx.rts and type "rit ltx".
To understand the comment environment and dynamic declarations, see comment.rts and type "rit comment".
RIT can be used in any of the following ways:
1. rit
2. rit filename
where filename is the name of file containing transliterated Telugu and English. rit assumes the Rice Transliterated Standard (RTS) for the input text, which can be summarized as follows.
![[acchulu]](http://teluguworld.org/RIT/achchulu.gif)
![[hallulu]](http://teluguworld.org/RIT/hallulu.gif)
Suppose you want to write a letter. You normally store it in a file,
like letterhome.rts. The .rts extension indicates that the file
conforms to RTS . Notice that you don't have to type "rit
letterhome.rts", although you could.
The first usage above, ie without filename, assumes that you will type
the input from the keyboard afresh, starting from the next line. (You
may also drag the text from another window, by the mouse.) When you
are done, type CTRL-D on a fresh line. But if you are going to write a
letter home, or write a short story, you will probably want to employ
the second usage.
You don't have to read further to use rit in its simplest form. You can
experiment with rit before reading further. There are several example
files in the rts directory, like typos.rts, letterhome.rts. You can
browse those files and run rit on them and see how rit works.
This is best explained by looking at what rit does when you run it on
one of the example files: type "rit -x letterhome" and see what
happens. Notice that a lot of English words are translated into
Telugu. Also, notice that English sentences are unaffected by the -x
switch.
Now type "rit -t letterhome" and examine the output to find that some
of the English words are now written in Telugu script. That is, -t
simply "telugizes" (transliterates into Telugu) some English words,
based on context. Also, notice that English sentences are unaffected
by the -t switches.
These switches are explained further below. If you already understood
how these switches work and what we mean by "context", you can skip to
the section titled "Default spelling correction". Consider
ivaaLa naaku school lEdu. My school is on the next street.
School is a common word in modern Telugu. There are several
English words which are assimilated into Telugu, some have Telugu
equivalents and some don't. For example, "baDi" is an equivalent to
school, but bus has no Telugu equivalent. These assimilated words are
freely used in Telugu sentences. rit provides three ways to handle
them. When they appear in a Telugu sentence, you can print them in
English, you can print them in Telugu (i.e. transliterate these
English words into Telugu), or you can print their Telugu equivalents.
The -t option transliterates such words into Telugu (it "telugizes"
them), -x option translates them into Telugu if there is a Telugu
equivalent, and prints the Telugu equivalent. Using no option prints
them in English.
rit -t
ivaaLa naaku school lEdu. My school is on the next street.
is equivalent to typing
rit
ivaaLa naaku skuul lEdu. My school is on the next street.
and
rit -x
ivaaLa naaku school lEdu. My school is on the next street.
is equivalent to typing
rit
ivaaLa naaku baDi lEdu. My school is on the next street.
Note that "school" in the second sentence is unchanged; as it should
be printed in English. Does it mean we can never write a Telugu word
in an English sentence? Of course not. "My skuul is on the next
street" prints skuul in Telugu, as expected.
By default, rit corrects some spelling errors in Telugu: for example,
maku is automatically corrected to maaku. If you want to suppress this
spelling correction on the entire file, you should use either of the
following:
rit -s
rit -s filename
To understand rit's spell-correction, type "rit typos" and compare the
output with that of "rit -s typos". (typos.rts is in rts/ directory.)
There is a way to suppress spell-correction on a single word or a
region. See "How to turn off spell-correction on a single word or a
region" section and Question 18 below.
Version 2.0 of rit includes a hook to read news or mail. You can
invoke invoke rit with "-n" option to activate the hook. For example,
most programs provide a way to filter articles or mails through an
external program. [You may have to specify the entire program name:
-- $HOME/rts/rit -n. If you find a simpler way, please let us know.]
The filter hook has a quotation mechanism also. To use it effectively,
you, the writer, must use ">" for quoting text.
The RTS definition is flexible enough to allow transliteration using
only lower case alphabet. If you decide to transliterate using only
lower case alphabet (eg using oe or o' or oa in stead of using O), you
can inform rit so, by using -l switch, as in "rit -l mypoem". This
means rit treats lower case and upper case as equivalent in Telugu text.
This is useful if you have the habit of starting every sentence with a
capital letter. This is also useful when you send an rts file to
someone else who doesn't have rit and want to emphasize certain words
by putting them in capitals. For example, you may post a message on
soc.culture.indian.telugu and want to emphasize a word in it, like
this: ABADDAM! If -l switch is specified (or "%[lowercase]" is
inserted in the text, see Advanced Features below), rit will print
such words correctly (eg as abaddam). We recommend you use lower case
of RTS , we hope to provide better services when you use it.
How about proper names? Are they Telugu or English? If the first
letter of a proper name is capitalized, then the proper name is
English, else it is Telugu. For example, Raju is printed in English,
whereas raaju is printed in Telugu.
Sometimes Telugu spell-correction may produce an undesired effect on a
specific word. (See Question 18 below.) Or, you may want to type a
poem with archaic words. Or it may be that you want to write a word
incorrectly, for some reason. For example, recall that rit corrects
maku to maaku. Suppose you want to print maku and not maaku, but you
don't want to turn the spelling correction off on the entire file.
Then, simply write _maku_. A region delimited by _(underscore)'s is
treated as telugu and printed as such with no spelling correction.
Notice that an underscore in the middle of a word does not delimit a
region. Also, a region can consist of a single word, several words, or
paragraphs.
Naturally, rit has some limitations. It may not always be able to tell
an English word from a Telugu one. There are some Telugu words which
become valid English words when written in English: mana, are, ani,
and nee are all English words too. rit does a reasonably good job on
them: mana, ani, and nee are treated as Telugu and "are" is treated as
English. But in some cases, it may treat a conflicting word as English
whereas you want to print it in Telugu, or vice versa. To make sure
that a conflicting word is treated Telugu, just enclose it with a _
(underscore): _are_, for example. A conflicting word is forced to be
English by enclosing it between #s: #mana# or # mana #.
Similarly, text enclosed between #s is treated as English, whether the
text is English or French or Telugu. Such text is simply not checked
against an English dictionary; it would be printed as it is. If you
want you can escape to Telugu region (with no spell checking) using
underscores.
If you are likely to use the same word again and again in one context
(either Telugu or English), there is a way to inform rit so, using
comment environment. See "Advanced features" below.
rit creates two files that will be of interest to you: filename.tex
and filename.dvi when you run rit on filename.rts (or on filename
without any extension). Typing rit without the filename option first
creates the file tmpin.rts as the input file from the terminal and
runs rit on tmpin.rts. After creating these files, rit runs xdvi on
filename.dvi or tmpin.dvi. If you want to print .dvi files and do not
know how to do it, contact a local guru. Most probably you have to
find out a way to inform the location of the fonts to the print
command. If you have postscipt printer, this process is explained in
the step 3 in the installation guide in this directory. If not, ask
your system guru on how to print your pk fonts on the printer.
Finally, you could combine -s option with -t, -l, or -x, by typing,
for example,
rit -ts
rit -t -s filename
If you pay attention to the following tips, you may save a lot of time
in using rit. You should first obtain familiarity with the Rice
Transliteration Standard. (We cannot overemphasize the importance of
your getting familiar with RTS . Spending about 30 minutes to "tview
doc/rtsdef.dvi" can save you a lot of time later.) Then, you should be
aware of the most common typo classes:
1. Vowel Contraction: Short vowels are typed when long vowels are
required. Ex: mama for maama, maku for maaku, nenu for nEnu (=ne'nu =
naenu=neanu). Watch for long vowels. If you already typed a short
vowel and realized that you needed a long vowel, you could simply add
either a or ' to whatever vowel you have typed; it will simply be
elongated. Ex: ea, oa, e', o' are long vowels.
2. Dental shift: t and d are typed where T (=t') and D (=d') are
required. Ex: aata, evadu, aavida. Notice that you could simply add '
to the dentals to make them retroflex.
3. You may have a tendency to capitalize the first letters of Telugu
sentences; they shouldn't automatically be. This is usually wrong, if
you are not using -l option to run rit; capital letters have a
significance in RTS . Telugu sentences don't necessarily begin with a
capital letter. Of course, if you use -l option while running rit, or
if your file contains a line "%[lowercase]", then there is no
difference between lower case and upper case in Telugu.
4. Proper names in English are not begun with a capital letter,
whereas they should be. Ex: december, english, new york are wrong;
they should be typed December, English, New York.
We support most of LaTeX commands as input to rit. But there are some
limitations. The basic idea is this: rit looks up each word in an
on-line English dictionary to find if it is an English word or Telugu.
If the word is not in the English dictionary, it treats the word as
Telugu and writes it in a special format. To protect latex commands
from this action, we have added all the latex commands to a file which
is an addendum to the on-line English dictionary. So, all the standard
latex commands are treated as English words by rit, and are not
affected by the transformation to Telugu. However, latex commands
sometimes have options which are like "llccr", ||l|lr|" which are
not in the addendum to the dictionary. Such options should be declared
"English" such that rit doesn't convert them to Telugu format. This is
done by enclosing such options between #s. Consider the two
examples:
\begin{enumerate}
\item gurajaad'a
\item Sree Sree
\end{enumerate}
\vspace{1 in}
\begin{tabular}{#|l|l|#} \hline
gurajaad'a & 1862-1915 \\
Sree Sree & 1910-1983 \\ \hline
\end{tabular}
\bigskip
This way, you can include latex commands in the input rit itself. You
normally don't need to edit the latex file rit creates. But however,
not all commands work with Telugu words as their arguments. Such
fragile commands still work as long as their arguments are English.
For example:
\section{kanyaaSulkamloe saamaajika vaataavaraNam}
\marginpar{ee paragraph teeseyyaale'mo}
don't work, but
\section{The social atmosphere in #Kanyasulkam#}
\marginpar{Maybe I should remove this paragraph}
do work.
Please see the file "ltx.rts" and run "rit ltx" to appreciate how
LaTeX cammands are used in the input to rit.
There is a "comment" environment in the RTS, with % as the
comment-begin delimiter. That is, everything between % and the
end-of-line is a "comment" and is ignored by software. This "comment"
environment is a feature of the RTS. That means, every software
program that takes rts files as input is expected not to print the
text in the comment environment. rit meets this expectation. For
example, if you run rit on
aayana novels annii English ninci copy ye'gadaa! %substantiate later
it ignores "%substantiate later". This allows you, among other things,
to write reminders to yourself in the text, that shouldn't appear in
the print-out. Similarly, if you don't want in the output a few lines
of text you have written and you don't want to delete them from the
file because you may want to use them later, then you can "comment"
them out by inserting a % in front of each of those lines.
rit extends the features of RTS specification through comments. The
additional features can be thought of as "complier switches". Recall
that rit has several options like -s and -t. One way to specify these
options is to give them on the command line, like "rit -s mypoem".
However, if you send mypoem.rts to someone else, they might run rit on
mypoem without the -s switch. (For example, this might happen if you
post mypoem.rts on soc.culture.indian.telugu - others might not know
if you wanted them to use -s switch.) These switches can be specified
within the file: If you include
%[nospell]
in mypoem.rts, -s option is applied to every rit that
runs on it, no matter what the command line option is.
Similarly, putting
%[lowercase]
in your text file forces -l option on rit, no matter what the command
line option is.
Other run-time options are specified as below:
%[telugize]
%[translate]
These option switches should be placed in the beginning of the file.
This comment environment has another use. rit allows the user to
update (or override) its data bases temporarily at the run-time,
through the comment environment. The motivation for this is the
following: You can always update your copy of rit's data base (eg, by
adding a proper name, or translation of an English word), at your
site. But you may want to send the text file to someone else who has
rit. Since their software doesn't know about your updates, their
output will be different from yours. Or imagine posting a message to
soc.culture.indian.telugu which others can read by running rit on your
message. You can communicate with the reader's copy of rit at run-time
about temporary updates of the data bases.
For example, you find that your town's name is not in rit's data base,
and you are referring to this name several times in your text. If you
are using this name in English sentences, one way to get it in English is
by enclosing it in #s (see Question 9 below) every time you use the
name. (ex. #Sannajajipadu# every time you use it.) Another way is
to insert a line in the text as below:
%[name Sannajajipadu sannajaajipaaDu]
When rit sees this line, it doesn't print the line. It simply
remembers that Sannajajipadu is a proper name and should be printed in
English (in English sentences) and that if it is to be printed in
Telugu, its Telugu spelling is sannajaajipaaDu.
Examples of other dynamic temporary update/override specifications:
%[meaning reactor riyaakTar]
%[meaning sound sounD cappuDu]
%[latex mycommand]
%[telugu madam dharma yoga]
%[english fella holomorphic infomercial]
The last two may require explanation: madam, dharma, yoga are English
words as well. By %[telugu word1 word2 wordn], we inform rit that
these words should be printed in Telugu. Similarly, fella is not found
in the on-line English dictionary. Such words are normally printed in
Telugu by rit. By %[english word1 word2 wordn], we inform rit that
these words are English words. Remember that providing information to
rit through comment environment means overriding the command line
options and the data bases. That is, if rit already has "sound sounD
Sabdam" in its data base, by %[meaning sound sounD cappuDu], you
override "Sabdam" with "cappuDu". These dynamic temporary data base
updates can be placed anywhere in the file, even at the end of the
file.
The key to rit's flexibility and power is its ability to distinguish
Telugu words from English. rit looks up each word in an on-line
English dictionary (using Unix's spell program). If the word is in the
English dictionary, then rit treats the word as English and prints it
accordingly. If the word is not in the English dictionary, then it is
a Telugu word (for rit) and will be printed so. This procedure will
work if the on-line English dictionary contains all the words in the
English language, and if no Telugu word becomes a valid English word
when transliterated.
In practice, the on-line English dictionary doesn't contain all the
English words but only a subset of them (eg, holomorphic doesn't pass
through Unix spell.) and there are a few Telugu words which when
transliterated become valid English words (like ani, mana). Another
practical problem is the spell programs are not perfect, and they
accept non-English words as English. (Unix spell passes talli, tanni,
diSaloe, for example.) Such conflicting words (Telugu words that
become English words when transliterated) are few, fortunately. More
important than their number is the likely occurance of these
conflicting words as English and as Telugu. While "mana" is an English
word, it is unlikely that it will be used in English sense by rit
users: so we default mana to Telugu. Similarly, we default "are" to
English. A key feature of the Rice Transliteration Standard for Telugu
is that it is almost "orthogonal" to English: there are very few
conflicting words, and they rarely cause problems.
The on-line English dictionary doesn't contain Indian proper names.
So, we added them to a local (English) dictionary which is an addendum
to the standard dictionary that Unix spell uses. When rit finds such a
proper name in this local dictionary, it treats the name as English.
Also, words like dharma, karma, and yoga are found in the standard
dictionary, and hence are treated English, by default. By providing a
way to change such defaults from English to Telugu and vice versa, rit
takes care of automatic determination of Telugu from English.
Once we determine if a word is English or Telugu, we can do several
things: we can determine if there is a Telugu word in the same
sentence before a given English word. If so, we say that the English
word occurs in a Telugu context. We can then provide a
translation/transliteration service on some English words. (We
maintain a small English-to-Telugu transliteration/translation
dictionary for this purpose.) Similarly, once we determine that a word
is Telugu, we can check its Telugu spelling to see if there are any
unacceptable letter clusters.
That is the basic idea, and the rest of it is good book-keeping.
0. What is rit?
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.