I am a new member who joined yesterday and I hope what I bring will be a good news for all here.
I am a volunteer in Project Madurai, which is an online effort for archiving Tamil literature - free to all. See http://www.projectmadurai.org
To the good news - I now have the entire Ponniyin Selvan text, typed in Tamil and sent by someone in Madras (no pictures though).
Doing all the proof-reading myself will take a long time which I think is not good. So I need help from some die-hard fans here to proof-read this work and once it is finished, we can place it on Project Madurai site, for all to enjoy. Given the zeal here, I believe most of you can check the text from memory.
Please send me an email, off the list and I will give you access to the etext. This is done just to keep the version control in place and administrative reasons.
It will be free to all, once proof-read. So kindly come forward. Your help will be acknowledged, in the Project Madurai collection.
I do volunteer for proof reading P.S. It would be a great pleasure for me to do this. One more reason of me wanting to do this is. For past 3 months i was going through many sites to get P.S and couldn't get it and later ordered through indvarta and they shipped it to me. After you put it in projectmadurai it will be helpful for people in US or other countries to read.
One suggestion is make 2 or 3 people to read same adhyayam (so even if one miss others can find error if any). If more people volunteers distribute it to them as different adhyayams and ask them to proof read that (if they do more than their allocation is always good so mistakes can be eliminated). This will be helpful in doing the work better.
One more thing i wanted to ask. If you are interested i can write Sivagamiyin Sabatham and send you. I just finished reading it. I don't know how to type in tamil. if you can help me on any suggestions on that i will dfnly will do something. These resources will be very much helpful for our tamil people living abroad and doesn't have any sources like this.
Thanks for the ideas on proof reading. As you said, each person each volume, will reduce the time taken and so will get the work out in public soon.
Btw, thanks for all those who volunteered cheerfully. Let us hope to get the Ponniyin Selvan on the web soon.
> One more thing i wanted to ask. If you are interested > i can write Sivagamiyin Sabatham and send you. I just > finished reading it. I don't know how to type in > tamil. if you can help me on any suggestions on that i > will dfnly will do something. These resources will be > very much helpful for our tamil people living abroad > and doesn't have any sources like this.
True. If we want the original Tamil work to get in the public, we have to type it. Project Madurai is an open initiative and whatever classic work the volunteer is interested in, will be archived. So once we have typed and proof-read Sivakamiyin Sabatham, others can enjoy too.
Any volunteers to type it in Tamil ? Each one of us with the book can just type one chapter and pool the effort to make this possible. If you need any help to type in Tamil, let me know.
You people have done really a great job. I am glad I could contribute something for this like Ramar pAlam kattta udhaviya Anil mathiri. Please let me know the Paagam and Adhyaayams. I will do the proof reading.
Ram, can't we correct in MS-Word with option Track Changes enabled.
1. I am seeing most of our conversation in phonetically translated english.. why don't we have the entire discussions in tamil. the Moderator can suggest some fonts or some package, which can be used by the group.
2. I have a package called vaanavil, a tamilnet 99 compliant software. however I can send mails in tamil but others also need to have a tamilnet 99 compliant package to read this.
3. I can talk with this software company for giving this package to the project madurai for translating sivagamiyin sabadham and other literary works.
3. As far as typing in sivagamiyin sabadham, i would suggest that we engage some typewriting institute or data entry operators to feed the entire kalki's collection. we can do this at various centers, only thing is font(unicode/tamilnet compliant) and size should be uniform across centres. Our group can do the final proof reading.
Anbumani, that's a great job you're doing. I would like to volunteer to proof-read Ponniyin selvan too. Just specify the bits you want me to proof-read.
About Sivagamiyin Sabhadam- its already appearing on the net. Kumudam.com is publishing it (its updated every monday, I think). I think its into its 3rd pagam(or is it the second?). Anybody who wants to read it can go there- the whole thing's archived.
And one of our members saved the whole of SS's first part as a doc file and sent it as an attachment in the first month of the group...I shall try to locate it.
I'll also add the kumudam website in the links section.
Srikanth...thanks a lot for your rhyme:-) Shanthi, sridhar, Mr. Sharma,et al...nice to know you enjoyed it.
Ram, I read your piece- cool:-)Looking forward to more...