[Tugindia] Devanagari Script and LaTeX

[Dr C. K. Raju]

Well, we have been having a discussion on this for some time now. (If I 
recollect you and others from Sarai were present at one of the meetings I 
organized around this in Bhopal, a few years ago.)

I think a few points need to be noted.

First, it is natural to use Unicode for software (and I routinely use it for 
the software that I write), since Japanese, German, and Hindi speakers might 
all wish to use it. However, the available Unicode fonts leave much to be 
desired from the typographical perspective, where the emphasis is on finer 
points of aesthetics rather than convenience. (My experience is limited to 
the Unicode fonts that are freely or commonly available.)

Secondly, for work relating especially to Sanskrit, there are a number of 
complex ligatures used in early texts, which ligatures are no longer in use 
in the Devnagari script used in modern Hindi, for example. While, in 
principle, a Unicode font has a lot more space for glyphs to include such 
ligatures, in practice it seems to me that a lot more work remains to be 
done.

Thirdly, when I summarily evaluated the situation about a year ago for my 
own book (which has a number of Sanskrit quotations in Devnagari from the 
sulba sutra onwards, and relates to mathematics), I got the impression that 
available TeX and LateX support for Unicode is limited, and there is no 
saying when a class might start misbehaving with Unicode fonts, leading to a 
long process of debugging. Even if that does not actually happen, the 
thought that this might happen half-way through the book is quite 
frightening, especially if one is working in time constraints.

For these reasons, I chose the devnag package, and am quite satisfied with 
it.

Perhaps the situation has changed, but it would help if you could point to 
some concrete advantages from the typographical perspective.

Best ,


C. K. Raju


>From: Ravikant <ravikant at sarai.net>
>Reply-To: ravikant at sarai.net, TUGIndia Mailing List <tugindia at tug.org>
>To: TUGIndia Mailing List <tugindia at tug.org>
>Subject: Re: [Tugindia] Devanagari Script and LaTeX
>Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2006 12:36:02 +0530
>
>The best way is to go is unicode. For installation, etc, see
>
>http://devanaagarii.net
>
>for more help on tools, etc:
>
>http://pratibhaas.blogspot.com/2006/01/blog-post_25.html
>
>Specifically for fonts:
>
>http://www.wazu.jp/index.html
>
>शायद कुछ मदद मिले
>
>रविकान्त
>
>
>
>
>
>शनिवार 21 अक्टूबर 2006 17:11 को, Cyrus.Mehta 
>ने लिखा था:
> > Dear Tug-India,
> >
> > We are producing an Indian edition of the "Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali",
> > lectures of Swami Sarvagatananda, originally published by the
> > Ramakrishna Vedanta Society of Boston. The current edition of the book
> > was typeset with LaTeX. We will be typesetting the Indian edition also
> > in LaTeX. This time, however, we would like to use the Devanagari script
> > to display the actual aphorisms (in addition to displaying them in
> > English). Can you help us with details of where to get the fonts, how to
> > install them on a Windows machine and how to use the keyboard to create
> > the characters?
> >
> > Thank you for your help.
> >
> > Cyrus Mehta,
> > Cambridge, Massachusetts
> > mehta at cytel.com <BLOCKED::mailto:mehta at cytel.com>
> > _______________________________________________
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