[Multilingual software, text processing tools, fonts, etc.
See also several sites mentioned under [General].
Mention of a product or site here is not a endorsement, but is for information of only. Except, I certainly endorse TeX :-)
Indological software (non-text processing)
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[Pancanga]
Prof. Yano's extraordinarily useful and sophisticated web-based tool for calculating various Indian eras and dates. Follows the Suryasiddhanta. Instantly converts Gregorian, Saka, and Vikrama dates.
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Low-cost Mac and DOS programs for drilling one in paradigms. Includes Sanskrit, Pali, Urdu, and many other languages. Free downloadable demonstrations.
Fonts, typesetters, word-processors, and document production tools
Major cross-platform resources
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[David McCreedy's Gallery of Unicode Fonts: Devanagari]
Very helpful site, giving illustrations of many Devanagari unicode fonts.
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[Indic Language Fonts] Maintained by Luc Devroye.
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A wide selection of Devanagari and Roman fonts, with added accents for Sanskrit, Tamil, and other S. Asian languages. For PCs, Macs and Unices, TrueType / OpenType and PostScript type 1, CSX, Norman and UTF-8 encodings.
Note especially John's [IndUni] and [Devanagari] fonts.
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[Indological Unicode support for Emacs and Omega]
By Stefan Baums.
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[Transliteration of Indic scripts: How to use ISO 15919]
The newly established International standard scheme for Indic transliteration.
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Chris Fynn's valuable essay, ``How to use Diacritics for Romanised Indic Text on the WWW'' is no longer available on its former web host, but past versions from 1999--2001 can be consulted at [the Wayback Machine].
TeX support
TeX is a typesetting program with strong multilingual facilities. For full information on TeX, including local user groups and and free downloadable software, see the international users group at [www.tug.org].
The Indian TeX Users Group is based in Trivandrum, and has a website at [http://www.tug.org.in/].
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[Frans Velthuis's Devanagari for TeX]
Provides a Nagari font with a design inspired by the famous Nirnayasagara Press fonts. Works with plain TeX and LaTeX, and can hyphenate Nagari text. Hindi and Sanskrit modes. With a C preprocessor, compiled for DOS, Windows, etc.
The project has developed substantially in recent years, with several new features, fonts, and styles added. See the project's new home website at the [Sarovar.org] project server in Trivandrum. The [CTAN] still also has the latest release.
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[Charles Wikner's Devanagari for TeX package]
Provides many of the same features as the Velthuis system, but adds support for Vedic accentuation, more choices over variant ligatures, tightness or looseness of setting, and both Nagari and roman transliteration from the same input encoding. The links in Wikner's page above are now obsolete, so to get the package, see the [source files on CTAN].
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Full Metafont fonts, with a C-language preprocessor.
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Full Metafont fonts, with a C-language preprocessor.
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Full Metafont fonts, with a C-language preprocessor.
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[Jun Takashima's transliteration font for Indic languages]
([Updated files]) Produces appropriate "philological" hyphenation automatically. To be integrated into the Babel system.
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Full Metafont fonts, with a no preprocessor. All conjunct hanuling done by the heroic use of TeX macros.
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[Jeroen Hellingman's Malayalam]
Full Metafont fonts, with a C-language preprocessor.
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Full Metafont fonts, with a C-language preprocessor. [Hellingman's] project also aims to produce a new Tamil Metafont, as well as PS, TTF, and Unicode fonts for Indic languages.
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[Yannis Haralambous's Sinhala font]
Full Metafont fonts, with a C-language preprocessor (produced from LEX source). Sponsored by the Wellcome Institute, London and the Computing Centre, Univ. of Groningen.
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Full Metafont fonts, with a C-language preprocessor. By Tom Ridgeway, L. Schiffman, and colleagues.
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[Tibetan]
Bitmap fonts at 300dpi (produced in 1987 by PXtoPK from an unknown original), with a C-language preprocessor. The original author of these fonts and pre-processor can no longer be reached (see [ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/languages/tibetan/original/readme]).
Sam Sirlin subsequently (1996) added machine-generated Metafont code, produced by Limn, as well as updating the system substantially (see [ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/languages/tibetan/original/sirlin/readme]). In 1997, Beat Steiner provided an alternative input processor which permits typesetting of many more Sanskrit syllables (see [ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/languages/tibetan/original/steiner/readme]).
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Yasuhiro Okazaki's SktSortKey program
Yasuhiro Okazaki has developed a sort key generator for TeX index system. This assumes you are using LaTeX and the makeindex program. SktSortKey will process your index file so that it will be sorted into Sanskrit alphabetical order.
The package includes a Mac Carbon executable file and source code which can be compiled on Unix or Windows OS.
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Yasuhiro Okazaki's TibSortKey program
Yasuhiro Okazaki has also designed TibSortKey, a Tibetan language sort key generator for the TeX system.
Platform-specific tools and resources
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[Using Unicode fonts with Mac OSX (Robert Zydenbos)]
For additional comments see this INDOLOGY posting and the reply.
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Website maintained by Gautam Sengupta, Centre for Applied Linguistics & Translation Studies, University of Hyderabad. ISIS is a free keyboarding system for Indian scripts, providing logical keystrokes for a variety of Indian scripts. Unicode encoding. Windows 2000 and XP, and also on several Linux distributions (Red Hat, Fedora, Mandrake and Suse).
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[Ganakashtadhyayi] by [Dr Shivamurthy Swamiji]
Ganakashtadhyayi, a Windows program, is a working implementation of the grammatical sutras of Panini. It has many features useful for learning the Paninian system and seeing it actually at work in word formation. Given a word stem, Ganakashtadhyayi can, for example, provide the full conjugation or declension, and also pointers oto all the sutras which apply at each step of word formation.
It provides:
- All the Sutras of Panini in Roman script using standard diacritical marks (Complete)
- Pada-Patha: Splitting of Sandhis in the Sutras for easy comprehension (Incomplete)
- Vrittis are given on the Sutras as found in the Siddhanta Kaumudi and Laghu Siddhanta-kaumudi (Incomplete).
- Sutras can be sorted either in the order of Ashtadhyayi or Siddhanta Kaumudi or Laghu Siddhanta-kaumudi.
- Provision for English Translation and Explanation is made (Incomplete)
- Some of the commands are made available at a click away using the right mouse button.
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[DEVAKEY] by [Peter Haunert]
Devakey lets you import Sanskrit Transliteration-texts of different formats. Devakey automatically converts back and forth between Devanagari and Transliteration, you may type one or the other way. Devakey makes it easy to type Devanagari, as it generates all necessary ligatures automatically.
DEVAKEY is a Windows-program, it runs under WIN 95 / 98 / NT. You can download a free demo which will not save or print. The registration key to release all features costs US$ 60,- / €60,- (US$ 20,- / €20,- for students). If you are from India or live in a developing country, you may get a special price of US$ 5,-.
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[Takhti Devanagari data entry editor] by [Sri Hanu_man ji]
Takhti allows you to enter Hindi text on Windows systems (including Win9X). It is a tiny little utility (100k or so). It was written mainly to ease typing in Hindi in XP (the INSCRIPT keyboard is not easy to use for Qwerty literates), but then it was realized that most people in India use Win9X and cannot access their own language because no method on inputting text is available. A lot of effort was made to make it run on the 8-bit Win9X systems.
It is meant mainly for email usage, and presently word processing features are not working fully. Unlike other programs, you can print, save and copy-paste.
It is free.
It uses Unicode character encoding.
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[Bengali typing system add-in for MS-Word 97/2000/XP]
Freeware. By Robin Upton, from Altruists International.
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[Baraha word processing for Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, and Kannada.]
Freeware, made in Bangalore. Data input in simple romanisation; on-the-fly conversion to Nagari or Kannada.
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See INDOLOGY list message from [Devarakonda Venkata Narayana Sarma] for the announcement that C-DAC has placed two of its wp programs in the public domain. (The link in his email has changed to the one given above.)
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[Acharya: The website for multilingual systems]
Systems Development Laboratory, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India
A number of software initiatives for inputting and viewing text in different Indian scripts. APIs and downloadable software for Unix and Windows platforms, etc. Also some e-texts, and online Sanskrit dictionary, etc.
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Innovative use of the WWW for interactive transliteration into Devanagari. The wave of things to come? Really interesting. Also the downloadable Sanskrit 98 font.
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[Reinhold Kainhofer's TrueType font for writing Devanagari]
The site also includes accented roman symbol fonts (Greek with breathings, etc.), Egyptian (Hieroglyphics, Demotic, transcription), and Ugaritic and Persian cuneiform.
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[ITRANS]
Avinash Chopde's package for printing text in Indian Language Scripts.
Devanagari (Sanskrit/Hindi/Marathi), Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, and Romanized Sanskrit script output. The input text to ITRANS is in a transliterated form, each letter in an Indian Script is assigned an English equivalent, and the English letters are used to construct what will eventually print out in the Indian Language Script.
Now also at [freshmeat.net].
[ITRANS WWW interface page] by Hari Adiseshu.
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[Indian Language Keyboard Program]
Indian Language Keyboard Program commercial package - for microsoft windows NT 4.0, windows 95 & windows 3.1. Software by Avinash Chopde, fonts by Shrikrishna Patil. A font + software program package that makes it easy to type text in Indian Language Scripts while still using the standard English keyboard. See the [testimonial] posted to INDOLOGY by Adrian Burton.
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Suppliers of Unitype and related Windows-based multilingual support software (including Sanskrit, Tamil, and most other Indian scripts). (Formerly Gamma Unitype.)
Sources of general information
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[The Multilingual PC Directory].
A mass of useful information, links, and documentation.
(Main site offline as of July 1999; above link is to a mirror.)
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A software and publishing company supporting minority-language communities. Links to many relevant standards. Also includes downloadable Unicode font.
Last modified: Wednesday, 14-May-2008 22:38:14 BST
& [Richard MAHONEY] contacts for [INDOLOGY site]
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