DIACRITICS FOR WP AND LASER

[Thomas B. Ridgeway]

Status: RO

Its Monday morning and I've lost track of who originally asked:
>
>  > ..., I would like to ask
>  > if anyone of you has information on existing programs for printing
>  > Sanskrit diacritics on laser printers from  Word Perfect.
>
 to which Dominik responded
> Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS has a very wide range of built-in characters
> (ca. 1700, I believe).  But I don't know if these include the chars
> needed for Pali/Sanskrit.  I would be interested to hear from
> colleagues about this.
>
> The last meeting of the World Sanskrit Conference at Vienna issued
> a document standardizing which characters of the 256 available in
> the 8-bit character set of microcomputers should stand for which
> Indic accented characters.  This character set is known as the
> CS (Computer Sanskrit ) and CSX (... eXtended) set; the latter is
> slightly expanded to include some letters needed for MIA and Tamil.
>
 
 
 
> Tom Ridgeway (member of this list) has also produced TeX fonts
> that adhere to the standard.  These fonts can me converted to
> HP Laser soft-font format if required, as well as being directly
> usable in TeX.
>
 
  Support for WordPerfect 5.1 with Indic in transliteration (using the
  metafont-created font) is in internal testing at Washington now.
  This is based on the same TeX fonts mentioned above translated
  by Norm Walsh's pktosfp utility.
 
    We aim to have screen-font support for EGA/VGA or Herc Plus,
  and printer support for HP LaserJet family only.  We also
  expect to be able to translate from CS/CSX encoded `otherwise plain ASCII'
  files into WP's coding.  This will definitely not be available in any form
  before summer, but sometime in the summer is a good guess.  Anyone
  with existing files can expect to have to do some conversion, as some
  Indic characters are in the inherently non-standard user-defined
  character space.
 
  Those with the capability and the interest can help us test out these fonts
  in their TeX-able form (from 128.95.200.1 in pub/indic with the bitmap pk
  fonts and tfm metric files in pub/indic/binary).  We have not had much
  material to use for testing . . . (the availability of the Panini and
  Asvaghosha texts is a *big* plus), and are just now discovering some
  inconsistencies in the font relating to subscript dot placement und so
  weiter.
 
cheers,
Tom
 
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Thomas Ridgeway, Director,
Humanities and Arts Computing Center/NorthWest Computing Support Center
35 Thomson Hall, University of Washington, DR-10
Seattle, WA 98195   phone: (206)-543-4218            *  Ask me about  *
Internet: ridgeway at blackbox.hacc.washington.edu      *    Unix TeX    *
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