DIACRITICS FOR WP AND LASER

[Dominik Wujastyk]

 > ..., I would like to ask
 > if anyone of you has information on existing programs for printing
 > Sanskrit diacritics on laser printers from  Word Perfect.
 
Status: RO

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.
 
This scheme was documented and published in the Newsletter of the
Internatinal Association of Sanskrit Studies (I believe) and in
the Sesame Bulletin.  I can supply copies of the document (please
send a stamped, addressed A4 envelope to me at the address below).
 
I have prepared screen fonts for VGA and EGA display adaptors, and
I can send these to anyone interested.  (email or post me a disk.)
 
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.
 
You need to be able to modify the Word Perfect printer control file to make
the character input and character output match up.  Also, you will
probably want to set up keyboard macros to make typing the new
characters easy.
 
Word Perfect users should also be aware of the work done by
Prof. R. E. Emmerick (member of this list) who has, over several years,
provided extensive multilingual support for Word Perfect users,
including support for Sanskrit and Pali,
and who has been strongly involved in the German WP users group.
(Did I get that right, Ronald?)
 
Best wishes,
 
Dominik
 
 
 
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Dr Dominik Wujastyk,     | Janet:                          D.Wujastyk at uk.ac.ucl
Wellcome Institute for   | Bitnet/Earn/Ean/Uucp/Internet:  D.Wujastyk at ucl.ac.uk
 the History of Medicine,| or: dow at harvunxw.bitnet    or: dow at wjh12.harvard.edu
183 Euston Road,         | last resort: D.Wujastyk%uk.ac.ucl at nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
London NW1 2BN, England. | Phone no.:                    +44 71 383-4252 ext.24
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