Dear Colleagues,

In a project at IIIT Hyderabad, with the assistance of a student there, I have created keyman keyboards to enter Devanagari and Roman with diacritics using the Sanskrit Library Phonetic ASCII encoding (SLP1).  The SLP1 encoding represents each common sound by a single ASCII character and uses modifier characters for accents and nasalization.

* The encoding is displayed on the data-entry help page at The Sanskrit Library at the following link: https://sanskritlibrary.org/help-text.html.  Linguistic issues in encoding Sanskrit, Appendix B viewable and downloadable from that page gives the full details of SLP1.  To get capital letters in the Roman entry, type the character with its modifiers within curly brackets, e.g. {x/~ = high-pitched nasalized vocalic l}.  A svarita is represented by a ^.  Only the R̥gvedic accentual system is included, but it does include aggravated svaritas by typing 97 after the caret, e.g. a^97 -> अ१॒॑, आ॒३॒॑.

* The Keyman app is available for either MacOS, WindowsPC, Linux, iPhone, Android, etc. at https://keyman.com/

* The slp1_roman and slp1_deva keyboards are available for download from The Sanskrit Library at the following links:

When using the Devanagari, select a valid Sanskrit font such as Sanskrit2020, Shobhika, Sanskrit Text, Praja, Chandas, Uttara, or Siddhanta.

The Chandas, Uttara, and Siddhanta fonts were produced by Mihail Bayaryn.  The first two are available at http://www.sanskritweb.net/cakram/; all three are linked to http://svayambhava.blogspot.com/p/siddhanta-devanagariunicode-open-type.html.  The Sanskrit2003 font was produced by Ulrich Stiehl and is available at http://www.omkarananda-ashram.org/Sanskrit/itranslator2003.htm, and the Sanskrit2020 font is an updated version of it that includes the VedicExtensions Unicode block to accommodate Vedic accents available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/advaita-sharada-font/files/Devanagari/.  The Shobhika font is available from the GitHub archive releases page: https://github.com/Sandhi-IITBombay/Shobhika/releases.  These fonts are all available free of cost.  Praja was produced by Peter Freund and is available for $35 at https://secure.bmtmicro.com/servlets/Orders.ShoppingCart?CID=5115&PRODUCTID=51150002.  The Sanskrit Text font, developed by Basit Ali, comes with Microsoft Windows; it can be installed by clicking the link, "Download fonts for all languages," in the fonts menu, and adding a language that uses Devanagari script into the language settings.  Arial Unicode MS is available with Microsoft Office, FrontPage and Publisher, with the installation of international support.  Devanagari MT is available with Mac systems with the Asian languages support.  Mangal is available with Windows systems with supplemental language support.

Yours,

Peter