translating sanskrit, ibm to mac

[J.K. Brzezinski]

In answer to your letter.  I have been working on MLS4 for some time and 
it is equipped by a program called CTIU which can be used for translating 
documents much in the same way that you described.  ASCII tables of all 
langauge programmes used in MLS are available in the manual. 

I tried at one time to create an English to Sanskrit/Hindi conversion 
programme which is theoretically possible.  As far as I can see this may 
be limited to only PC compatible programmes. Some problems arise because 
of half characters and matras as you point out.  Most of this is not a 
great problem because they are written as overstrikes.  It simply means 
that you have to write each individual syllable as single character 
consisting of possibly more than one ASCII character.

Excuse my somewhat convoluted explanation but I hope that it is of some 
help.  If you have any further questions do not hesitate.

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                          Jan Brzezinski, PhD
		  Centre for the Study of Religion
		        University of Toronto
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On Mon, 23 Jan 1995, Sadhunathan Nadesan wrote:

> 
> Namaste distinguished scholars:
> 
> I am working on a project for Hinduism Today and would appreciate
> any advice.
> 
> Mr. Satya Pal Sharma, of Vedic University, is translating certain
> English texts into
> Sanskrit (and Hindi) using MLS4 (multi lingual scholar),
> a word processor for ibm compatibles that supports Devanagari
> letters.  I have to convert these texts to be readable by a 
> Mac word processor using the Ecological Linguistics Devanagari
> font.  The problem is compounded by the fact that I do not know
> Sanskrit, and Mr. Sharma's English is somewhat limited.
> 
> My approach:  have Mr. Sharma type up the alphabet, export to
> ascii, and do a hex dump to see what the ascii numbers are.  Do
> the same thing on the Mac, and compare.  Write a translation
> program between the two sets of numbers.  Then figure out how to
> take a plain ascii file and make a resource fork for it on the Mac,
> so it can be read by the Mac word processor.
> 
> The dilema may be that there are half charaters and matras
> in Sanskrit which can be combined with other characters or
> half characters to give a huge number of possible letters.  Mr.
> Sharma tried to explain this to me, but I'm not sure I understood
> it.
> 
> One thing that would be helpful would be a complete list of
> all possible Devanagari letters, with their specific names.
> In this way I could get a comprehensive alphabet from both
> word processors, and make sure the translation was precise
> (rather than relying on the pictorial form of the letter, and
> risking an error because of my untrained eye).  Anyone know of
> such a list?
> 
> Thanks in advance for any suggestions,
> 
> Regards,
> Sadhunathan Nadesan
>  
>