[Tugindia] First impression of "devnag"

[Amitabh Trehan]

> If information with  me is correct, then that imply  that some serious
> work in  typesetting in Hindi is  done after about 10  year of release
> "devnag" package. Now developer may not be  a heavy user, and if heavy
> users are not there then package cannot be refined or developed.

 Thats completely true. In fact, my paper at the TUG conference highlighted 
this need. Here we've experimented with three packages - devnag, Sanskrit and 
ArabTeX. devnag is most  stable of the lost, it seems, but packages clash 
with each other. Seems like a language suite is required.  Wikner's Sanskrit 
is beautiful for the old look Sanskrit (bigger characters) and has an amazing 
range of diacritics.

>
> Now which package is best? For this  the person who uses these package

> thing to produce  right output in one language  (say Hindi). Then just
> changing environment should produce  correct output for other language
> i.e  then producing  output in  Punjabi, Gujrati,  Marathi, should  be
> matter of changing environment. Is it so?
 Can't say. But Anshuman Pandey is maintaining all these packages (devnag, 
gurmukhi etc etc.) and Itrans also (I believe).  It should not be too 
difficult to follow the same transliteration scheme for all languages with 
minor adjustments for 1 or 2 different characters. In fact, I am working on a 
common phonetic based encoding system for all indic scripts.

regds,
Amitabh


Amitabh