I have just been going through the ISO standard for transliteration of Devanagari and related Indic scripts ISO-15919 and I found something quite surpriseing.
Note the following rule quoted exactly from the standard is a requirement not an option. The rule includes an example from Sanskrit.
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Rule
3.
a)
In
modern vernaculars, anusvara before a stop or class nasal shall be
transliterated as the corresponding class
nasal; in other languages, anusvara before a stop or class nasal
shall be transliterated as thecorresponding
class nasal unless it arises from sandhi (euphonic combination) of
final m with that consonant.
EXAMPLE
1 Sanskrit संग is
transliterated as saṁga
when it represents the noun formed from sam + root gam, but as saṅga when
it represents the noun derived from the root sañj
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That means in many cases if you transliterated a manuscript exactly as it was keeping all anusvaras as anusvaras you would not be following the ISO standard for transliteration. It also seems to me the standard is crossing the line from transliteration into "interpretation".
I'm somewhat surprised this found its way into the standard.
Harry Spier
.