TeX for Indology

[Vidhyanath K. Rao]

kichenas at math.umn.edu asked
> Is there a (La)TeX style file which enables
> the input of Romanized text? All the tools for this are
> present in TeX (macrons, dots over and under letters,...)
> and all that is needed is the definition of an 
> environment which would enable the user to input
> \begin{tamil}
> kaNTanen kaRpinuk k-aNiyai
> \end{tamil}
> and produce the output corresponding to
> {\em ka\d n{}\d t{}a\b n{}e\b n kaRpi\b n{}uk k-a\d n{}iyai}


I do not know of any existing style files. But I have thought of
writing one. But I gave it up for reasons that will become clear when
I describe what one would need to do:

	If a single character needs to be replaced by a string, then
	just make it into an active character. then you can associate
	a macro to it.

	If you need to use digraphs, trigraphs etc, then the first chacracter
	must be made into a control character; you will need todefine a
	macro that examines its arguments (following characters) to
	decide what to do.

As you can see, if you need to do the latter, then it is quite cumbersome.
But you have TeX 3.0 and an editor that does not barf at 8-bit characters,
you need to use only the first alternative. You can automatically use
any font you wish.

If you want to stick with ASCII (7-bit set), it will be better to use
a filter that makes the required string substitutions. In UNIX, you
can use sed, for example. It is a trivial matter to match this to
any transliteration scheme. I prefer this approach rather than
create long and hard to follow TeX macro files.

P.S. If you are going to use only Roman characters (with diacritics),
ITRANS is overkill. A simple filter that does the required substitutions
is less resource-intensive.



Nath Rao (natharao+ at osu.edu)		614-366-9341