CSX fonts

[Anshuman Pandey]

On Tue, 24 Feb 1998, Daniel Baum wrote:

> What I need to do is to use the Harvard electronic RigVeda, and the
> metrically restored version, which is in a kind of CSX coding, as well as a
> few other e-texts. I need to take examples from these and put them in a
> database, and thence into TeX, probably with Itrans, to do the actual
> writing at some time in the future.

The electronic Rig Veda you have is probably in the ITRANS encoding
(unless you happen to have got it from someone who converted it to CSX).
John Gardner did a lot of work in reconstructing the Harvard e-RV into the
present ITRANS format. I took these files from his http://vedavid.org/
server and converted them to CSX. I have also gone through and edited the
first two mandalas; adding missing portions, etc. using the Harvard RV
hardcopy as the proof.

These CSX versions of the RV are available in a ZIP'd archive from:

        http://weber.u.washington.edu/~apandey/texts/rv-new.zip

Also, Avinash Sathaye has worked with Gardner's ITRANS files and added
accents to the text. Preprocessing Sathaye's files with ITRANS and then
running them through LaTeX will produce Devanagari text of the RV with the
appropriate accents. I don't know if, or the extent to which Sathaye
proofread the files before he added the accents, but I suspect he must
have done a very thorough job. I don't know if these files are publically
available.

> My problem is that I can't seem to find a font that works in all the
> programs I am trying to use, for whatever reason.

If you mean that the diacritics won't appear when using CSX fonts, that
might be because the texts you are working with are not in the CSX
encoding.

> Under Linux, The Washington Indic fonts do not display the letter e-acute or
> a-acute, either in their Truetype or Type 1 varieties. I have checked using
> Character Map and its Linux equivalent (xfd). Xfd shows these letters to be
> actually missing, while character map under W95 shows them to be there. This
> is very bizarre, as the Truetype font is exactly the same file under both
> operating systems.

The Washington Romanized Indic fonts are outdated. I've been working with
the METAFONT (TeX) sources, modifying details of accent placement and
character design. If you want to use a CSX-encoded font, then I suggest
you turn to the Norman, CS-Utopia, or CS-Charter fonts. These are
available in both TrueType and Postscript varieties from the INDOLOGY
archive or from John Smith's site:

        ftp://bombay.oriental.cam.ac.uk/pub/john/

These three TTF and PS fonts are much more aesthetically pleasing than the
WNRI TTF and PS fonts. The WNRI TTF and PS fonts are rather crude versions
which the developer, Thomas Ridgeway, threw together for users who wanted
to use CSX in Windows. I believe this was before Dominik Wujastyk and
Peter Schreiner adapted Adobe Utopia and Bitstream Charter for CS. I wish
to snuff out the current TrueType and Postscript versions of WNRI and
eventually replace them with newer ones based on the Computer Modern TTF
and PS fonts.

Also, if you intend to use a Romanized font for your dissertation, then
you really ought to use a beautiful font; and for not having to write a
check to a foundry, Utopia and Charter do the job quite well.

The updated METAFONT sources for WNRI are available in the file wnri2e.zip
from:

        http://weber.u.washington.edu/~apandey/texts/wnri2e.zip

and within a few days from the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN) in
directory:

        ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/wnri/          OR
        ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive/fonts/wnri/


Best of luck.

Regards,
Anshuman Pandey