Roman text with a few choice diacritics are a common need when writing about Indian classical music. Creating unicode text with diacritics that can be ported between applications is in general a pain. So, I made a small in-browser app that serves as a scratch pad for common diacritics.

Usage

Straight forward. You just type your text in the provided box using normal roman characters first - ex: “Sankarabharanam”. Once you’ve typed that in, you select each character to which you want to apply diacritical marks and click on the mark you want. You can also press the number key corresponding to the diacritical mark you want for the selected character. With this, you can get “Śankarābharaṇam”.

Your text is automatically saved to local storage, so you can visit the page any time and retrieve your text. You’ll never lose text you key in.

Known issues

This works fine in Chrome and Safari on MacOSX, but not in Firefox. I haven’t yet figured out why it doesn’t work in Firefox. If you find that it works in Chrome/Safari on Windows/Linux, please let me know in the comments.