TUGboat, Volume 19 (1998), No. 2 115
the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian language families of Fonts India. Such uniformity in phonetics is reflected in orthography, which in turn enables all scripts to be transliterated through a single scheme. This unifor- An Overview of Indic Fonts for TEX mity has subsequently been reflected in the translit- Anshuman Pandey eration schemes of the Indic language/script pack- ages. 1 Introduction Most packages have their own transliteration Many scholars and students in the humanities have scheme, but these schemes are essentially variations on a single scheme, differing merely in the coding preferred TEX over other “word processors” or doc- ument preparation systems because of the ease TEX of a few vowel, nasal, and retroflex letters. Most provides them in typesetting non-Roman scripts, the of these packages accept input in one of the two availability of TEX fonts of interest to them, and the primary 7-bit transliteration schemes— ITRANS or ability TEX has in producing well-structured docu- Velthuis—or a derivative of one of them. There ments. is also an 8-bit format called CS/CSX which a few However, this is not the case amongst Indol- of these packages support. CS/CSX is described in ogists. The lack of Indic fonts for TEXandthe further detail in Section 3. perceived difficulty of typesetting them have often 2 The Fonts and Packages turned Indologists away from using TEX. Little do they realize that TEXisthe foremost tool for de- Figure 1 shows examples of the various fonts de- veloping Indic language/script documents. With an scribed in this article. Table 1 lists the sites from increase over the past few years in the development which all of the fonts and packages described in this and availability of Indic language and font pack- article are available. ages, the introduction of other fonts and style pack- 3 CS/CSX ages, the flexibility of the LATEX2ε system, and the creation of TUGIndia (which may revolutionize the CS/CSX (Classical Sanskrit/Classical Sanskrit eX- typesetting of Indic scripts) there is now even more tended) is the closest thing to an accepted stan- reason for Indologists to implement TEX in their dardization of 8-bit transliteration of Indic scripts. work. Adopted in 1990 at the 8th World Sanskrit Con- There are roughly thirteen major Indic scripts ference in Vienna, CS/CSX enables Indologists to (Tibetan is included in this list) which are used exchange electronic data in a variety of platform- throughout South Asia to write the major languages independent media. and dialects of the region. As of this article all of CS/CSX is an encoding convention based on IBM Code Page 437. CS is a basic inventory of dia- these major scripts can be typeset with TEX, the exception being Assamese (see Section 6). critic letters which are traditionally used to translit- Not only is it fascinating that the major scripts erate Sanskrit written in the Devanagari script. CSX of South Asia can be typeset with TEX, but the ease is an extension of this basic inventory to include with which such a task can be accomplished is itself accented and other characters. Contrary to what an amazing feat. Anyone who has ever tried writing the name indicates, the inventory of CS/CSX char- a document with multiple non-Roman scripts and acters is not limited to Sanskrit, and may be used diacritic text in an environment other than TEX un- to transliterate other Indic languages. Introductory information on CS/CSX is found derstands the complexity of such a task. TEXtakes the user beyond such difficulties by facilitating the in an article by Dominik Wujastyk titled Standard- implementation of multiple scripts without the has- ization of Sanskrit for Electronic Data Transfer and sle of worrying about various fonts and their en- Screen Representation [1]. This document, as well codings, manual font switching, and other such hin- as supporting screen fonts and drivers for DOS-based drances to productivity caused by common “word machines, is available from the INDOLOGY site as processors”. well as from CTAN. TEX enables the incorporation of several non- Various fonts and packages have been developed Roman scripts within a single document through which enable TEX to typeset documents encoded in transliterated input of the scripts. Indic scripts are the CS/CSX convention. These are enumerated be- based on the phonetic template of the languages low: they represent, a template which is uniform in both cp437csx The file cp437csx.def is an input en- coding definition file for LATEX2ε which enables
116 TUGboat, Volume 19 (1998), No. 2
K g G R kKÅgÅGÅdû k K g G R
k ã
Devnag Devnac Devnag Pen
Ka ga Ga z
k @ØZwWC Íû©Ê×
Sanskrit ItxBengali ItxGujarati
K g G ऄ आ ऎ ऐ
ckgGL k
Punjabi Gurmukhi Washington Tamil
G H I