translating sanskrit, ibm to mac

[pslvax!sadhu at UCSD.EDU]

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