typing Sanskrit

[tantrapl at hektor.umcs.lublin.pl]

> Leslaw's system  "BO" seems just as good as any other 7-bit scheme.  I
> think it is probably better to decide which side of a letter your accents
> will appear -- BO has accent-markers on the left and on the right of
> letters, which makes automatic parsing much more fiddly.  

I don't quite understand. 1) You don't have to put diacritical marks BEFORE
writing a letter (which goes against normal practice), 2) you don't have to use
capital letters inside a word (which leaves you possibilities of using
them in a traditional way or otherwise), 3) you can use both tapewriter and 
computer in the same way 4) you don't have to learn a system which is very 
different from international convention of writing Sanskrit -  these are the 
advantages some other systems lack. 
 It may be all the same for computers to use this or that system but not for 
new people who are learning Sanskrit with the help of a computer and have to 
memorise strange sequences of keys to type a letter and a diacritical mark.
If you mean computerwise it's all the same so the better for BO.

Also, I did not write about accents. It has definitely not been my idea to
put their marks on the left and on the right of letters! We don't have to use
them that often but if you have to then put them right after the letter.
It's natural to do it that way.
 
> However, Peter Schreiner's transliteration scheme is very similar to BO in
> general principle, and more fully worked-out.  In addition, there is a
> significant corpus of work in Peter's coding, which makes it worthwhile to
> develop conversion tables for moving in and out of his scheme (to TeX, for
> example).
It's nice to know somebody had similar ideas. I don't know Peter Schreiner's
transliteration. Could somebody advise me please where in the net could I
read a good presentation of it.
 
> Finally, I should like to say *again*, pace Lars M. Fosse's remarks which
> I consider refutable, that no 7-bit coding scheme for Sanskrit is
> essentially better than any other, as long as ambiguity is avoided.  And
> the tools for converting from one scheme to another are so widespread and
> easy to use, that surely we must ask whether the topic remains
> interesting?  
Again, for a computer it may be all the same. It is not so for a man,
especially for those who are not both computer specialists and Sanskrit 
scholars ;-)

Might we seriously consider replacing any typing on this
> topic by typing actual Sanskrit texts (in any coding :-)?
Didn't got the allusion. BO is meant not for eliminating devanagari. It is
meant for electronic (and typed) texts where you mix latin script words with
words from Sanskrit. I also think devanagari has some disadvantages in
electronic presentations of text.

That's all this time
				Leslaw 

 
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