CSX+ Encoding and other Encodings used by Indologists (fwd)

[Dominik Wujastyk]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2002 12:35:57 +0100
From: Ulrich.Stiehl <Ulrich.Stiehl at t-online.de>

Subject: CSX+ Encoding and other Encodings used by Indologists

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CSX+ Encoding and other Encodings used by Indologists

A few days ago, I offered a new CSX+ font, compatible with latest versions of
Word and Windows. Exactly 10 indologists asked for a copy of the new CSX+ font.
For comparison, the new Itranslator software has been downloaded by more than
1200 users so far. This means that CSX+ encoding is practically "dead". Another
"dead" encoding is REE used by approx. 5 indologists worldwide. This means that
the text files, available from the GRETIL site in CSX+ and REE encoding, are
destined for a minority of approx. 15 indologists worldwide, who still use CSX+
or REE encoding. This deplorable situation is due to the fact that many
indological institutes devised their own priprietary schemes of transliteration.
For instance, in Germany, the universities at Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg,
Heidelberg, etc. etc. use their own transliteration encodings incompatible among
each other and incompatible with CSX+, REE and other encodings devised by
institutes in France, Italy etc. etc. Some are of the opinion that Unicode is a
way out of this encoding jungle, but a lot of diacritical letters required for
translitering Indic scripts have not been defined by the Unicode consortium, so
that these additional diacritics must be defined by font makers in the "Private
Use Area" (hexadecimal range E000-F8FF).

Ulrich.Stiehl at t-online.de