Rev. July 1999,
Contact: cssetzer@mum.edu
Texts listed below including fonts and viewer for Win 95/98;
VedaType Word processor for stand alone use in Win 95/98 or as a plug-in for MS Word, and
TextView, a "Manual" OCR add-on for VedaType, (These are included as shareware
on the Vedic literature CD-ROM)
Multimedia CD-ROM to support first year Sanskrit including recitation of noun and verb forms, a Sanskrit song, short Sanskrit play; Several other Multimedia projects.
These texts were typed in India by Cosmic Software in Delhi, starting around 1987. All texts were typed directly from Devanagari, and in Devanagari. No changes have been made to the original texts. After typing they were proofread and edited three times. Based on many spot checks I believe there is about one typographical error per page, (Font size determines length of the page.) The entire group is provided on CD-ROM with six formatting conventions. 1) straight texts in Devanagari as typed, including several fonts, MS Word 6 doc files. 2) Same files changed to Peter Freund Davanagari font. These are plain text format, so you need to change the font when first loaded. 3) Same thing but Peter Freund Roman transliteration font. Forma is plain text. 4) Same as (1) but with some incorrect font mappings replaced with what we believe are all correct ones. The font substitutions appear in red color. Also, for proofing purposes, the first occurrence of each font character in each file appears in green color. Files are in PC RTF format. 5) Same as (4) but green coloring is removed. 6) Plain text format in 7-bit VedaType encoding. As shown below, this is quite similar to Harvard Kyoto.
VedaType Character set and typing format:
The CD-ROM includes TrueType windows fonts and Macintosh fonts. Macintosh fonts require access to a windows PC to create disk and copy fonts off of CD. A font utility is included to read/write Mac disks on PC. A file viewing utility is provided for Windows 95/98.
Sanskrit Texts: (About 28MB total in Microsoft Word format)
This requires Windows 95/98. It is special version of WordPad, that allows automatic formatting of Indian fonts. You type in a specific 7 bit "transliteration" and fonts appear on the screen as per your choice: Devanagari, Roman Transliteration, or English. Tamil and Telegu versions are in progress. Multiple fonts may be used in the same file. A utility is included for conversion between different fonts. At lower typing speed, VedaType also works as an add-in to MS Word. (version 6 works best, most features also work in 95 and 97).
This requires VedaType but runs on its own. You need to scan in text and load it into the program. Then Textview has a floating single line word processor that you position just below the scanned text. Thus you view the original on the screen as you type in your own text. After editing the program compiles all the typed lines into a text file. People generally think this allows typing some 10 to 20 times faster that other methods.
A single a two tray (one tray = 256 characters) excellent (Peter Freund) Devanagari
font is included with the CD-ROM. You may also purchase a 7-tray version of the same font
(requires VedaType for use). Included with the 7-tray font is the text of the first 80
chapters of Caraka Samhita.
The only font characters that can be relied upon to always display correctly are the 62 simple Roman characters and the 10 digits. In spite of all the magnificent electronic technology available and all the work done by international standards groups, the other characters, especially the upper 128 are subject to a wide range of "interpretation" by virtually all available software. The font as it appears on your screen will be influenced by the version of your word processor, the version and type of operating system, the country code pages in use, and various other factors. Even the cut and paste function in a word processor can change the spelling of a word in a complex font, such as Devanagari. To help address these issues, we have included a variety of different formats, including a 7 bit font, and also a word processor specifically designed to avoid these problems on the Window 95 operating system. You may also reduce the level of font problems by saving files in either raw text or in RTF format.