Fonts/extended char sets

[Peter_Scharf at brown.edu]

To all Mac Devanagari Font users,

        There have been a couple of complaints on the network recently
about the the reliance of Devanagari and Roman diacritic Fonts on the
extended character set.  Use of the extended character set to represent
Sanskrit (or Hindi, etc) makes it difficult for certain standard computer
tools to handle the language properly.  For instance programs to transfer
ASCII files will not be able to interpret some of the characters not
included in the standard ASCII character set.  It was to meet just this
type of difficulty that I designed a screen Font (bit map font) to
represent Sanskrit sounds using just the upper and lower case keys.  The
entire character set of this Font is a subset of the ASCII character set
making it simple to use with all standard searching, and data transmission
programs.

        The Font also makes it easier to type Sanskrit, which was an
additional reason for its design.  Devanagari Fonts are very cumbersome to
use by virtue of having numerous keys for a single sound depending upon the
context of the sound.  This is an inherited feature of the script which is
not posible for any Devanagari Font to overcome, even if it makes serious
compromises to the large set of conjunct characters.  In order to get
Devanagari in a beautiful Laser Font (or for that matter, to get Roman
Diacritics in a laser Font without hunting up special keys) one may use a
program I have written to transliterate from my easy-to-type-in and
easy-to-use-general-computer-applications-on Font to a couple of Devanagari
and a few Roman diacritic laser Fonts.

        I have used this system to type lengthy files entirely in Sanskrit
and have found that I can type Sanskrit as quickly as English (my first
language).  I have also written a program to do Sanskrit sandhi on files in
my Font and intend to make it the standard for programs to alphabetize and
do other linguistic functions on Sanskrit.

        My transliteration program currently transliterates to Jaipur and
Vedic (Devanagari Fonts) and Hindustan and South Asia Times (Roman
diacritic Fonts).  Plans are currently under way to include  Ken Bryant's
Jaisalmer and Taj True-type Devanagari and Roman diacritic Fonts and Madhav
Deshpande's Laser Fonts.  If anyone has made, sells, or uses True-type or
Postscript Laser Devanagari or Roman Fonts they would like my
transliteration program to transliterate to, I will adapt my program to do
so if they send me the Font or tell me how to get it.

        Sincerely,

Peter M. Scharf
Department of Classics
Brown University
PO Box 1856
Providence, RI 02912
e-mail:Peter_Scharf at brown.edu

p.s.  Concerning: Mac fonts/Windows
fonts/postscript/TeX/Meta/TrueType/screen-bitmap fonts/ etc., etc.).

Madhav Deshpande wrote a summary of Indic linguistic tools available for
computers which appeared in the Newsletter of the American Oriental Society
about a year and a half ago (issue and page numbers are not at hand at the
moment).  Perhaps an update is due.
                        P.S.