Re John Smith's Mahaabhaarata

[Jutta K. Lehmann]

This will serve as a reply to Harold Arnold, Beatrice Reusch, Joel 
Tatelman and other "Mac users in a PC world" who have asked for more 
information on converting Prof. Tokunaga's voluminous files to a Mac font 
format. Let me say in advance that I agree with Beatrice that a manual 
search and replace would take some time and patience (the Rg Veda would 
no doubt be a nightmare). 

The first thing to consider is the particular font you wish to use (e.g. 
Normyn, Mytimes, Madhushree, Indic Times etc.). The task is to translate 
the source coding (in this case Tokunaga's system) into the keyboard 
equivalents of your preferred font. Of course you could proceed by doing 
a letter-by-letter "search and replace" with your word processor. A much 
quicker method is to use a search and replace utility such as Torquemada 
(the one I happen to use). The following information from the ReadMe file 
will explain better than I can:

"Torquemada is a Macintosh bulk search and replace utility. It
operates on files of type 'TEXT' and incorporates a number of
features to facilitate the wholesale revision of text. Among these
are more than 30 "wildcards" of various stripes, which make it
possible to write very elaborate search and replace strings. Strings
are stored in sets of up to twenty strings per set. Up to 32 set
files can be deployed at once, yielding a total of 640 search and
replace strings. Under System Seven, up to 32 set files and up to 128
text files can be dropped on the program's icon; each set will be run
against each text file in an unattended batch."

Once you have set up your parameter, the program does its thing in a 
matter of seconds (Yes, the whole of the Mahabharata in a matter of 
seconds - unbelievable!).

Version 1.1.0 is still freeware although the author has also developed a 
commercial version. Unfortunately, I cannot remember the site where I 
downloaded this, but it should still be available on one of the Info-Mac 
sites, at Stanford, or at the Merit Archive.

Hope this helps.

Julian Woods