Sanskrit Software

[Dominik Wujastyk]

I have used TeX since the mid-1980s for all my writing, and I've found it 
excellent.  I like a system whose author guarantees that it will never be 
upgraded, and who will send you a cheque if you find a bug.

The next release of MikTeX (already out in a late beta) includes Xetex, a 
fully Unicode-compliant variant of TeX.  Xetex has been available on Macs 
for some time, and people like it.  It allows you to write in any Unicode 
script and font, like Devanagari, Cyrillic and Arabic, all in one 
document, seeing the stuff correctly as you write it, and then having it 
beautifully typeset by TeX for printing or typesetting.  Oh, and of course 
it's all free, as usual for TeX-related software.

   http://miktex.org/
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XeTeX
   http://scripts.sil.org/xetex

-- 
Dominik Wujastyk




On Sat, 15 Dec 2007, Richard Hayes wrote:

> 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/
>
>