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You are here: Encoding > Conversion > Utilities
Short URL: https://scripts.sil.org/EncCnvtrs

SILConverters 4.0

Microsoft Word/COM support for TECkit, CC, and ICU, Perl and Python

Bob Eaton, Mark Penny, 2015-08-14

Note:

This page is now obsolete and remains here for historical purposes. The new SIL Converters home page is at:  https://software.sil.org/silconverters/

Overview



This package provides tools through which you can change the encoding, font, and/or script of text in Microsoft Word and other Office documents, OpenOffice and LibreOffice documents, XML documents, and SFM text and lexicon documents. It also installs a system-wide repository to manage your encoding converters and transliterators (TECkit,  CC,  ICU, Perl, or Python based, as well as support for adding custom transduction engines).

For developers, it provides a simple COM interface to select and use a converter from the repository. It is easy to use from VBA, C++, C#, Perl, Python or any .NET/COM enabled language.

The core EncConverters assembly is fully integrated with SIL FieldWorks, Speech Analyzer, Phonology Assistant, Adapt It and OneStory Editor software. It provides the same system-wide registry of installed and available encoding converters for all of these user programs. Additionally the package includes some extra utilities such as a clipboard converter for manipulating text between cut and paste operations.

The following picture illustrates the suite of tools, utilities, and applications that are available and how they interact:

Figure 1. SIL Converters Suite



Figure 1 shows the three distinct layers to SIL Converters.

  • At the top are various client applications. These user-oriented programs use the EncConverters core assembly to provide encoding conversion and other transduction facilities to their users.
  • The EncConverters core provides an abstraction layer so the client applications can access the various transduction engines without having to implement the interface to each one separately.
  • The transduction engines are the server applications that provide the actual conversion/text processing capability.

If you are an end user, you are probably most interested in how to use EncConverters with client applications—for example:

  • Using the Bulk Word Document Converter to convert the encoding of text in one or more Word document to Unicode, or
  • Using Bulk SFM Converter to convert SFM documents into Unicode (typically texts and lexicons from Shoebox to Toolbox)

If you are a developer, you may be interested in

  • Using EncConverters to gain access to the different transduction resources available by writing to the single EncConverters’ interface. See this webpage for details and code snippets.

Upgrade! New Features

This version (4.0) was released to fix various bugs including most significantly the removal of the core EncConverters assembly from the Global Assembly Cache. From v4.0 and following, client applications will redistribute the core assemblies ECInterfaces.dll and SilEncConverters.dll with their applications directly. They can still share the same global system repository of activated converters, but there will be less dependency between the various clients in terms of release requirements.

As of v3.1.1, a new transduction engine was added that provides support for the webpage-based converters in the Scientific and Technical Hindi  Google Group. The  Files section of that group contains a number of webpage-based encoding converters and transliterators for numerous Indic legacy encodings. The conversion code embedded in these web-pages can now be used to convert data with any SIL Converters client application (e.g. the Bulk Word Document Converter) by using the new Technical Hindi Html EncConverter Add-in. To activate this new add-in be sure to check the Maps and Tables, Indic converters feature during installation. Once installed, you can read Help for Technical Hindi (Google group) Html Converter Plug-in (in Start, All Programs, SIL Converters, Help) for further instructions.

The Bulk Word Document Converter was also updated to fix a few problems related to converting text that was inserted into a document a single character at a time (thru the Insert Symbol command).

SILConverters 4.0 corresponds to the same version of the core EncConverters assembly as Fieldworks 7.1 and overcomes the uninstallation problem previously encountered in Speech Analyzer 3.0.1 and Phonology Assistant 3.0. If you uninstalled any of the applications which used the earlier version of the EncConverters core, it would become unavailable to the other applications that used the same, earlier version of the EncConverters core until an installation Repair was done. See this webpage for details. This new version solves that uninstallation problem.

The Bulk Word Document Converter was enhanced for this new version by adding a search feature which will search your hard-drive for documents containing specific fonts to be converted.

The TECkit Map Unicode Editor has also been enhanced to show character maps for both the left and right-hand side of a conversion so that a point-and-click approach to encoding conversion can be used in developing the map.

Quick Installation Overview

Note

You will need Administrator privilege on the computer to install this software.

The Master Setup program runs a series of installers:

  1. Software prerequisites—Necessary system updates and add-ons are installed on your computer.
  2. SIL Encoding Converters 4.0 Setup—Conversion applications are installed and conversion Maps and Tables are copied to your hard drive.
  3. SIL Converters for Office 2003—Currently this installer only installs an additional operating system update.
  4. Converter Option Installer—A utility that allows you to activate the conversion Maps and Tables you want to use.

Full installation instructions can be found here: SIL Converters 4.0 Installation. This document is intended to guide you through the Master Installer installation screens and initial SIL Converters 4.0 Setup. This guide may be sufficient for many users. However, to make full use of SIL Converters, you should download and refer to the Help for SIL Converters documentation (download below).

Downloads

Documentation
 
SILConverters 4.0 Installation documentation
Bob Eaton, 2011-08-29
Download "SILConverters40Install.pdf", Acrobat PDF document, 360KB [9017 downloads]
This document gives installation help. This is the same information that is found here: SIL Converters 4.0 Installation.
 
SILConverters Documentation
Bob Eaton, 2011-08-29
Download "SILConverters40_doc.pdf", Acrobat PDF document, 2MB [9439 downloads]
This document gives information about how to use the different utilities and applications for different text transduction applications. It is also available via Start / Programs / SIL Converters / Help / Help for SIL Converters, but you must use a PDF reader (e.g. Adobe Acrobat) to view it.

SIL Converters 4.0

This version of SILConverters uses the same version of the EncConverters core as FieldWorks 6.0.

Offline package-only installer
 

 SIL Converters 4.0 package only (no addons) for offline installation (EXE file)

Size: 22 MB

MD5 hash: bad2c72402adecca6be2042d810f9202

This download is recommended for users that have a fairly good internet connection and want to download an installer that can be run off-line. This is also recommended if you intend to install SILConverters on multiple machines since this link will download the total install set (less required components, such as .Net 2.0—see Standalone installer)

Download, Extract files and run setup.exe. There are no specific Installation instructions for this. However, you should find the installation instructions for the web installer helpful: SIL Converters 4.0 Installation
Offline Standalone installer
 

 SIL Converters 4.0 Standalone installer (includes addons like .NET) for offline installation (EXE file)

Size: 73 MB

MD5 hash: 1e8a9abe88af2885e859338e180b1db2

This download is recommended for users that have a very good internet connection and want to download an installer that has all potential prerequisites and can be run off-line. This is also recommended if you intend to install SILConverters on multiple such machines since this link will download the total install set (including all required components).

Download, Extract files and run setup.exe. There are no specific Installation instruction for this. However, you should find the installation instructions for the web installer helpful: SIL Converters 4.0 Installation

Previous versions

The older products are still available for those who require it:

Please note, however, that we strongly recommend using the newer version from this page.

SIL Converters Maps and Tables

This section describes the encodings, font names, and converters contained in the different Maps and Tables packages available in the SILConverters 3.1 installer. You can check below for the fonts/encodings that you are interested in to see which Maps and Tables package to install.

Most end-users are interested only in a small number of encodings. Typically, computer support people have created TECkit maps and/or CC tables for the various encodings used in each entity, alleviating most end-users from having to create their own maps and tables.

Because there are hundreds of possible encoding converters and transliterators that different end-users may be interested in, they are packaged into logically-related groups of converters and are available via a two-step process.

Steps

1) Use the SILConverters installer to install the package(s) of converter likely to be useful to you (e.g. based on your entity).

During installation, all the converter maps/tables in the selected package(s) will be installed into a fixed location on your computer (i.e. C:Documents and SettingsAll UsersApplication DataSILSILConverters31MapsTables on Windows XP or C:ProgramDataSILSILConverters31MapsTables on Vista).

2) Use the Converter Options Installer application to install the few applications you want into the EncConverters’ system repository.

They become available to SILConverters client applications.

Note

Installing maps and tables onto your computer with the SILConverters installer (step 1 above) will not make them available to SILConverters client applications unless you explicitly add them to the system repository using the Converter Options Installer or some other mechanism (see Adding Converters to the System Repository in the Help for SILConverters document).

Select Features — Optional Maps and Tables



The following sections give the details about fonts and encodings for different Maps and Tablespackages:

Basic Converters

Converters and Transliterators common to all SIL. This includes the following:

Converter NameEncoding NameFont Names
SIL IPA93<>UNICODE SIL-IPA93-2001 SILDoulos IPA93
SILManuscript IPA93
SILSophia IPA93
SIL-IPA-1990<>UNICODE SIL-IPA-1990 SILDoulosIPA
SILManuscriptIPA
SILSophiaIPA
SIL Galatia <>UNICODE SIL-GREEK_GALATIA-2001 SIL Galatia
ISO-8859<>UNICODE ISO-8859-1
AMER PHON>UNICODE (SIL)-Amer_Phon_SILDoulosL3-(2005)
SIL PUA 3.2<>UNICODE 4.1
SIL PUA 3.2<>UNICODE 5.0
SIL PUA 3.2<>UNICODE 5.1
Symbol<>cp1252
UTF8<>UTF16
ReverseString For reversing the bytes of a “narrow” (bytes) string
null No change to string, but can be used to apply a different font to some text (e.g. in the Data Conversion Macro)
NFC Convert to normal form composed
NFD Convert to normal form decomposed

ICU Transliterators

Configuration information for the following ICU transliterators are for Unicode-encodings only.

These are not the only transliterators available via the ICU Transliterator transduction engine, but are only a few of the pre-defined latinizing (or romanizing) transliterators that can be useful in different client applications for different ranges of Unicode.

  • Devanagari to Latin (aka. Devanagari-Latin)
  • Bengali to Latin (aka. Bengali-Latin)
  • Gujarati to Latin (aka. Gujarati-Latin)
  • Gurmukhi to Latin (aka. Gurmukhi-Latin)
  • Kannada to Latin (aka. Kannada-Latin)
  • Malayalam to Latin (aka. Malayalam-Latin)
  • Oriya to Latin (aka. Oriya-Latin)
  • Tamil to Latin (aka. Tamil-Latin)
  • Telugu to Latin (aka. Telugu-Latin)
  • Arabic to Latin (aka. Arabic-Latin)
  • Cyrillic to Latin (aka. Cyrillic-Latin)
  • Greek to Latin (aka. Greek-Latin)
  • Han to Latin (aka. Han-Latin)
  • Hangul to Latin (aka. Hangul-Latin)
  • Hebrew to Latin (aka. Hebrew-Latin)
  • Hiragana to Latin (aka. Hiragana-Latin)
  • Katakana to Latin (aka. Katakana-Latin)
  • Jamo to Latin (aka. Jamo-Latin)
  • NumericPinyin to Latin (aka. NumericPinyin-Latin)
  • Any to Latin (aka. Any-Latin)

Note

These transliterators can be daisy-chained together to transliterate between non-Latin scripts using a Compound meta-converter. For example, chaining the Devanagari-Latin transliterator (in the Forward direction) with the Arabic-Latin transliterator (in the Reverse direction) gives a ‘Devanagari-Arabic’ transliterator.

FindPhone to IPA converters

Adds the following converters for dealing with FindPhone encoded data:

  • FindPhone>SIL IPA93
  • FindPhone>UNICODE

SAG Indic

Contains encoding converter map(s) for the following encoding/font:

Converter NameEncoding NameFont Names
Annapurna<>UNICODE SIL-ANNAPURNA_05-2002 Annapurna
SAG IPA<>UNICODE SIL-SAG-IPA SAG-IPA SILDoulos
    SAG-IPA SILManuscript
    SAG-IPA SILSophia
SAG IPA Super<>UNICODE SIL-SAG-IPA_Super SAG-IPA Super SILCharis
    SAG-IPA Super SILDoulos
    SAG-IPA Super SILManuscript
    SAG-IPA Super SILSophia
WinDTS Devanagari<>Unicode SIL-WinDTS WinDTS Devanagari
TransRoman<>UNICODE SIL-SAG_TransRoman21-2002 TransRoman2 Charis
    TransRoman2 Doulos
    TransRoman2 Manuscript
    TransRoman2 Sophia
AkrutiOriSarala99<>UNICODE Oriya-AkrutiOriSarala-99 AkrutiOriSarala-99

Cameroon

Contains encoding converter map(s) for the following encoding/fonts:

Converter NameEncoding NameFont Names
Cameroon <>UNICODE Cameroon Cam Cam SILDoulosL
Cam Cam SILSophiaL
Cam Cam SILManuscriptL
Cam2 Cam2 SILDoulos
Cam2 Cam2 SILSophia
Cam2 Cam2 SILManuscript
Cam Paratext SILDoulos
Cam Paratext SILSophia
Cam Paratext SILManuscript

Central Africa

Contains encoding converter map(s) for the following encoding:

Converter NameEncoding Name
angb4<>UNICODE SIL-angb4-2005
MarcelNgbaka<>UNICODE SIL-MarcelNgbaka-2005

East Africa

Contains encoding converter map(s) for the following encoding/fonts:

Converter NameEncoding NameFont Names
Times African<>UNICODE Times African Times African
Bantu Und<>UNICODE Bantu Und Bantu Und

Eastern Congo Group

Contains encoding converter map(s) for the following encoding/fonts:

Converter NameEncoding Name
Mayogo<>UNICODE Mayogo
Komo<>UNICODE Komo
KomoASCII to Unicode KomoASCII
ECG<>UNICODE ECG-Unicode(Jan.2005)
BuduASCII<>UNICODE BuduASCII
BUDU<>UNICODE BUDU
BheleASCII<>UNICODE BheleASCII

West Africa

Contains encoding converter map(s) for the following encoding/fonts:

Converter NameEncoding Name
SIL-93linb-2005<>UNICODE SIL-93linb-2005
UBS-Abidjan-2005<>UNICODE UBS-Abidjan-2005
Bambara SIL Charis<>UNICODE Bambara SIL Charis
SIL-BF Font Family-2005<>UNICODE SIL-BF_Font_Family-2005
SIL-BF_Times-2006<>UNICODE SIL-BF_Times-2006
X-SIL-Fulfulde<>UNICODE X-SIL-Fulfulde
SIL-Ghana Doulos-2005<>UNICODE SIL-Ghana_Doulos-2005
SIL-Mali Standard Font Family<>UNICODE Mali Standard SILDoulos-2005
RCI Standard Doulos/Sophia/Manuscript<>UNICODE SIL-RCI Standard-1994
X-SIL-Senufo<>UNICODE X-SIL-Senufo
SIL-Karaboro-2006<>UNICODE SIL-Karaboro-2006
SIL Samogho Doulos/Sophia/Manuscript<>UNICODE SIL-Samogho-2006
SIL-Songhai-2006<>UNICODE SIL-Songhai-2006
Tombouctou-Dutch<>UNICODE SIL-Tombouctou-Dutch-2006
Burkina Faso Winye-2003<>UNICODE SIL-Burkina_Winye_Unknown_Font-2005

Hebrew

Contains encoding converter map(s) for the following encoding/fonts:

Converter NameEncoding NameFont Names
SIL Ezra<>UNICODE SIL-HEBREW_STANDARD-1997 SIL Ezra
Hebrew Unicode 4.0<>Hebrew Unicode 5.0 SIL-HEBREW_Unicode_40-2004 Modifies Unicode Hebrew from 4.0 to 5.0

Indic Converters

  • ISCII Encodings

The following ISCII encodings are supported:

Converter Name
ISCII Devanagari<>UNICODE
ISCII Bengali<>UNICODE
ISCII Gurmukhi<>UNICODE
ISCII Gujarati<>UNICODE
ISCII Oriya<>UNICODE
ISCII Tamil<>UNICODE
ISCII Kannada<>UNICODE
ISCII Malayalam<>UNICODE
  • Himalli

The following Himalli encodings are supported:

Converter NameEncoding NameFont Details
HimaliNew Devanagari<>UNICODE Devanagari-HimaliNew For use with the Himali New font
Himallill Devanagari (Mac)<>UNICODE Devanagari-HimallillMac-1999 For use with files that use the Mac version of Himallill font
Himallill Devanagari (PC 2001)<>UNICODE Devanagari-HimallillPC-2001 For use with PC files using the Himallill font named Himallil.ttf, dated 11-Dec-2001
Himalli Devanagari (Mac)<>UNICODE Devanagari-HimalliMac-1999 For use with files that use the Mac version of Himalli font
Himalli Devanagari (PC 1998)<>UNICODE Devanagari-HimalliPC-1998 For use with PC files using the PC Himalli font named himalli.ttf dated 12-May-1998
Himalli Devanagari (PC 2002)<>UNICODE Devanagari-HimalliPC-2002 For use with PC files using the PC Himalli font named himalli_.ttf (note underscore) dated 18-Dec-2002
  • Miscellaneous TECkit Converters

This package contains TECkit maps for the following Indic encodings:

Converter NameFont Name
GujaratiLS<>UNICODE GujaratiLS
KrutiDev010<>UNICODE KrutiDev010
KrutiDev011<>UNICODE KrutiDev011
KrutiDev290<>UNICODE KrutiDev290
Kantipur Devanagari<>Unicode Kantipur
Preeti Devanagari<>Unicode Preeti
Shusha<>Unicode Shusha
Tibetan Modern A<>Unicode Tibetan Modern A
UniDevanagri<>UniIPA (phonetic) Transliteration between Unicode Devanagari and Unicode IPA (phonetic) representation

Papua New Guinea

Contains encoding converter map(s) for the following encoding/fonts:

Converter NameEncoding NameFont Names
SIL PNG<>UNICODE SIL-PNG_Fonts-1998 PNG SILCharis
PNG SILDoulos
PNG SILManuscript
PNG SILSophia Lit
PNG SILCharis Lit
PNG SILSophia CQLit

NLCI (India)

Contains encoding converter map(s) for the following encoding/font:

Converter NameEncoding NameFont Names
SL Oriya<>UNICODE NLCI-SLOriya
Winscript/iLeap Devanagari<>UNICODE CDAC-ISFOC_DEVANAGARI DEV Panini
    DV-TTYogesh
Winscript/iLeap Gujarati<>UNICODE CDAC-ISFOC_GUJARATI GUJ Gir
Winscript Malayalam<>UNICODE NLCI-Malayalam MAL Vayalar
Winscript Oriya<>UNICODE NLCI-Oriya ORI Asika
Winscript Tamil<>UNICODE NLCI-Tamil TAM Thiruvalluvar
Winscript Telugu<>UNICODE NLCI-Telugu TEL Nirmal

Related resources

Encoding Conversion Frequently Asked Questions and Known Issues Lorna A. Priest, 2009-05-15
Frequently Asked Questions and Known Issues concerning conversion of legacy data to Unicode.

SIL IPA93 Data Conversion Lorna A. Priest, 2009-02-16
Step-by-step instructions on how to convert Microsoft Word, text or Standard Format (sfm) documents that use SIL IPA93 fonts in order to use Unicode fonts.

To compose or decompose, that is the question Bob Hallissy, 2005-02-15
In our workflow, should we standardize on composed (e.g., NFC) or decomposed (e.g., NFD) character encoding for our Unicode data?

 OpenOffice Linguistic Tools — this tool provides similar resources for LibreOffice

Contact information

Contact for limited support.


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