World Sanskrit Conference computing workshops

[Das Menon]

At 07:31 PM 12/3/96 GMT, Ralph Bunker <ralphbunker at msn.com> wrote:

>
>Consider two Sanskritists S1 and S2 who want to exchange files. S1 uses a 
>Macintosh, hates transliteration and prefers to only see Devanagari. S2 is a 
>PC user and prefers transliteration. Would it be possible to write a computer 
>program which lets them type sanskrit texts the way they want to AND to read 
>and edit each others files the way they want to. Such a program should have at 
>least following features:
>1. It is available as shareware for a nominal fee (10 US dollars).
>2. It is available on Intel, Macintosh and Unix platforms.
>3. The user can train it to recognize any typing convention.  By typing 
>convention I mean the actual keystrokes that are used to produce the text on 
>the screen. So long a in one typing convention might be 'A' and in another 
>'aa'.

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I believe that a program that is based on the  Unicode standard will be the
way to go to have most, if not all the features. BUT I doubt if such a
program will be available for US$10, considering the payments a developer
has to pay to Unicode Consortium for membership and/or to acquire the
necessary development tools. Perhaps it is possible for around US$99, for
the PC, and a higher fee for Unix. I cannot comment on the Macintosh.

We hope to have a program released in January that plans to support input
(typing) methods based on the Tuebingen-Zuerich format, ITRANS format as
well an the INSCRIPT (Govt. of India std. script keyboard layout) format.

Regards...Das