Sanskrit Software

[Richard Hayes]

On Friday 14 December 2007 22:09, Nivedita Rout wrote:

> Another programme called 'MikeTex' which is
> most used by western scholars are one of the advance programmes for
> convertion of Devanagari and roman transliteration.

It is possible that what Nivedita Rout has in mind is mikTeX, which is the 
name given to one of the entire TeX/LaTeX installations ported to Windows.
See http://miktex.org/ There are also implementations ported to Mac. TeX/LaTeX 
is native to UNIX systems and is a standard part of most Linux distributions.

Any implementation of TeX/LaTeX can make use of either of two excellent sets 
of macros developed by Velthuis or Wikner. TeX is a markup language, not a 
WYSIWYG editor, so what one sees at the input level is romanized Sanskrit. 
When the code is run through a compiler, it produces a file (either DVI or 
PDF) that can be viewed on screen or printed out. In the viewed or printed 
version one sees Devanagari--either Hindi or Sanskrit, depending on which 
options one chooses. There are also quite good LaTeX macros for typesetting 
Tibetan, Bengali, Panjabi and all the south Indian languages.

Although LaTeX is often called TeX for the impatient, it is not really for 
people who are impatient with computers. It takes time to master the code, 
but once one learns it, one is unlikely ever to want to use anything else. 

A place to start learning more about various TeX options for typesetting 
Devanagari is http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/languages/devanagari/ 

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico