Sorting Devanagari text

[mhcrxlc at dir.manchester-computing-centre.ac.uk]

There is no major problem with sorting text in diacritics on the PC or on a
larger computer running the Oxford Concordance Program to produce a
wordlist, index or concordance. I have used this for Pali text and was able
to solve almost all problems.

One can define one's own alphabetical order and also define groups of
letters to be treated as single letters e.g. tx can be treated as a single
letter in the alphabet and placed as the first retroflex consonant.

If it was really necessary, even the more difficult problems such as those
mentioned with anusvaara, etc. could be dealt with by assigning special
letters or by replacing pairs of letters temporarily with something else
before sorting. In practice, however, with smaller texts it might be
simpler to just edit the result with a word processor with drag and drop.

Unfortunately, however, I have not yet found anything as good for the Mac.

Lance Cousins

MANCHESTER, UK
Email: mhcrxlc at dir.mcc.ac.uk