fonts

[Gérard Huet]

Dear indologists,

the flurry of messages concerning fonts prompted me to look into the 
problem of generating proper
ligatures for Sanskrit on the Web. Thanks to the hint provided by 
Stefan Baum on nov 12th, I
understood how to encode ligatures in Unicode, and I could generate 
pages with correct rendering
mixing devanagari with ligatures, transliteration with diacritics, and 
French with accents.
I have tentatively installed an experimental version of my site 
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~huet/SKT/
which I submit to your perusal. In order to get a correct rendering, 
you must have installed on
your workstation Unicode compliant fonts, such as IndUni from Cambridge 
for diacritics, and
Sanskrit99 from Ulrich Stiehl for devanagari (or Devanagari MT for Mac 
users).
At present, I get correct rendering using Mac System X browser Safari 
1.2.4 - except that there is still
some problematic buffer size limitation (devanagari does not show after 
a while for long Web pages).
If you try it out, please let me know by private email whether you get 
properly rendered devanagari
by viewing a typical page such as 
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~huet/SKT/DICO/gh.html.
Please mention precise parameters of your installation:
- operating system version
- browser version
- relevant locally installed fonts.

If people are interested, I could explain my method for Sanskrit 
publishing, featuring:
- perfect typography for scholarly documents with TeX
- good rendering of Web documents with devanagari ligatures and 
diacritics
- unique source of documents in roman diacritics (using any 
non-ambiguous transliteration scheme)
- fast algorithms for linguistic processing (using arithmetical 
encoding of phoneme streams).
In this methodology, TeX descriptions AND Unicode/UTF8 representations 
are compiled from
transliteration texts in 7-bit ASCII, so there is no need for specific 
keyboard input or Unicode editors.

Gérard Huet