Nandu Abhyankar's suggestions on indology focus groups

[s. kalyanaraman]

     Let me summarize the suggestions made by Nandu Abhyankar 
     nandu at vtph2.ple.af.mil 
     
     Nandu's excellent suggestions relate to the promotion of focussed 
     discussions/info. exchange on a number of topics; he also seeks 
     directions from indology group members on the development of Sanskrit 
     dictionary on internet:
     
     (1) Status report on availability of transliterated Sanskrit texts on 
     internet: 
     
     Prof Tokunaga and his Japanese students have recently made available 
     the entire text of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, in a 
     transliterated form (english). MIT scholars have made a first attempt 
     to re-encode those input texts in ITRANS format, and thus also obtain 
     Sanskrit Devanagari output. Version 1.0 of this effort is now 
     available for general net access. 
     
     The address of the anonymous FTP site directory is:  
     ftp://saraswati.mit.edu/pub/iepics-1.0/ Thanks to Sandeep Kumar Gupta 
     <skgupta at mit.edu> for this FTP site.All the files in that directory 
     (except the READMEs) are compressed using GNU-ZIP, so gzip/gunzip are 
     needed to expand the files. The line spacing is still undecided. At 
     present the 10pt printing uses12pt for baselineskip.  The one and half 
     spacing (15pt) is known to look better but the page numbers increase 
     by almost 100*(15/12) percent. Based on the input from others, this 
     and other problems will be corrected. Avinash Chopde (508) 640 3138 
     avinash at acm.org Avid Technology, Inc Tewksbury, Massachusetts, USA 
     avinash at avid.com 
     
     (2) Status report on Sanskrit dictionary on internet: 
     
     Creating a sanskrit dictionary on internet is a big task which has to 
     be done by full-time scholars; directions from indology group members 
     are welcome.   
         
     (3) Sanskrit Texts available on other newsgroups: 
     
     There are some texts (in sanskrit) available on ftp or http to 
     chandra.astro.indiana.edu which of course need meanings. The texts are 
     encoded in the ITRANS transliteration scheme and can be easily 
     converted to CSX format. The software is developed by Avinash Chopde 
     and uses Frans Velthuis's devanagari fonts and TeX/LaTeX. 
     
     (4) Promotion of interest in conversational Sanskrit: 
     
     A new sanskrit monthly sambhaashaNa sandeshaH is being published from 
     Bangalore. It is designed to promote interest in conversational 
     sanskrit.