[Tugindia] Re: Devnag and unicode

S. venkataraman svenkat at ignou.ac.in
Thu Feb 26 13:12:08 CET 2004


Hi,
> Yes, I've read the article and understand a little more the 
> problem. I've thought that writing directly in unicode is a 
> easier task. But there are so amny ligatures... What is the 
> devanagari encoding? I have the option in my Yudit editor, 
> but don't see any efect, use of it. Does LaTeX support 
> devanagari encoding?
The devanagari fonts use their encoding.  I do not know if the 
 encoding yudit uses is the same.(Most probably not. I suspect 
 it will be the devanag subset of unicode encoding.)  If you want to
know the 
 encoding used in latex for devanagari fonts 
 you can do the following: type `latex nfssfont' in the shell prompt.
 Latex will ask you the name of the font.  Type `dvng8' (for example.). 
 The latex will now say `Now type a test command(\help for help):'
 Type `\table'.  It will again print a *. Type `\bye'.  Latex will write
 the font table in the file nfssfont.dvi in the same directory. You can
view 
 in the dvi previewer. All this will work provided you have a reasonably

 complete installation of latex.  If you have installed all 
 the tex packages for redhat linux( the only one I am familiar with) it 
 will work fine.
> So, that is the biggest problem. So, when I remove The otp's, 
> everything will be fine? Only some characters missing? I've 
> tried it, but got no output at all. I don't understand the 
> otp's files yet and the whole internal mechanism.
No. I was wrong.  If I remember correctly, the otp/ocp roughly 
 do the following: They convert whatever you type into unicode 
 equivalents.  For the missing characters and ligatures the empty slots 
 slots in the unicode encoding for devanagari are used. This is done in 
 more than one stage. Then, unicode is converted to latex devanagari 
 encoding.  
> I've read these articles. They are very useful.
> 
> I don't work in Windows. But it is not very tiresome using 
> preprocessor. Do you mean still writing in tranliteration 
> scheme, not directly, using real devanagri fonts while typing?
Yes, it is.
By the way, using itrans is very painful for tamil.  Have you 
 tried out the orginal version put out by Washington University?
 If I remember correctly, they were a bit more easier.  Of course,
 itrans uses an enhanced version of wntml fonts.
With best regards,
Venkataraman


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