Generating multilingual documents in Indian languages
sadananda (sada@anvil.nrl.navy.mil)
Tue, 8 Oct 1996 08:26:19 -0400
Here is a copy of the announcement in the Sanskrit Digest of interest to
telusa members - Those who want to read in telugu output - and to Vasu for
puzzles -
Hari Om!
Sadananda
---------------------
From: Atul Narkhede <atul@yamuna.asd.sgi.com>
Date: Mon, 07 Oct 1996 09:40:22 -0700
Subject: generating multilingual documents in Indian languages
Dear Friends,
Here is a new utility where you can generate text in devanaagarii
(Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit), Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu over
ordinary Email. Once a structured, simple form of transliterated
input is mailed to itrans@yamuna.asd.sgi.com with subject strictly
typed as "itrans convert" without quotes, you will receive a
postscript file, over email, which can be viewed or printed on a
postscript printer to get high quality text in the chosen language.
This is a public domain utility based on the ITRANS transliteration
system for Indian languages. Many people have been using this
procedure for past few years to generate long documents.
Details are given below including how to get help files for different
categories. The help files contain many examples of input
texts. Please print them and use them till you get familiar with
it. The transliteration rules are same for devanaagarii, Bengali,
Gujarati scripts but are slightly different for Tamil and Telugu due
to difference in number and form of letters. If you already know
TeX/LaTeX commands you will have added `power' in using this utility.
If you have public domain metafonts for other scripts or are willing
to develop one in your own language, please send a note to
avinash@acm.org.
Any standard postscript viewer (Ex. ghostview) can used to view the
output. Most of these are freely available from several ftp sites.
Send mail to atul@sgi.com for more information.
There is no need to install any software such as
TeX/LaTeX/ITRANS/dvips et cetera on your computer for using this
feature. It is as simple as communicating over email. If your mail
browser is capable of handling MIME encoded input, you should be able
to invoke ghostview (or any other postscript viewer) automatically on
the output message.
If you have access to world wide web, an on-line interface is also
available where you can type the text in English ITRANS scheme and the
output is obtained in Devanagari and other languages, interactively,
right away! Please see the web site
http://dworkin.wustl.edu/~hari/itrans.html
or contact Hari Adiseshu at hari@dworkin.wustl.edu for more
information. The site includes transliteration rules for different
languages. Please get used to the transliteration rules to minimize
errors.
This utility should be useful in preparing multilingual documents,
encoding poems/articles/brochures/announcements/handouts, creating
your own crossword puzzles, communicating in different languages
directly. If you have any further questions, please direct them to
atul@sgi.com. We hope that your printing needs will be partially
satisfied with this utility.
Thanks!!
- -------------------------itrans_convert.readme -------------------------
This file describes a utility for using Indian language fonts
for documents encoded in ITRANS (an Indian language transliteration
utility developed by Avinash Chopde). You specify the language to be
used (see below for the list of supported languages and fonts) and
encode all input in ITRANS format. The utility converts user input
into postscript and mails back the results immediately. If any errors
are detected during the process, the error log is mailed back.
It is possible to to use all languages/fonts in a single
document and mix them in any arbitrary fashion. Font sizes are also
easily controlled.
The program also supports generating crossword puzzles in any
language. More information is available in the help files.
1. Getting help/documentation:
---------------------------
Send mail to itrans@yamuna.asd.sgi.com with the subject
"itrans help" (without the quotes). If the body of the message is
empty, you should receive this document. You can request more help
by including one or more of the following lines in your input
help convert
help crossword
a) help convert: get help about converting ITRANS text to postscript
b) help crossword: help about generating crosswords in Indian
languages.
2. Converting ITRANS to Postscript:
--------------------------------
Send email to itrans@yamuna.asd.sgi.com (full name necessary)
with the subject "itrans convert" (without the quotes) with the input
in the following format (the words following the % sign are comments):
begin-document % Only this word on the line
%%
%% All text inside the (begin-document, end-document) pair is used as
%% input. Rest is ignored!!
%%
<your input text>
end-document % Only this word on the line. Insert a newline
% after end-document
In the input text, you can use all (well, most!!) of the latex
commands. All text in Devanagari (or other Indian font) should be
enclosed in ## ## pairs.
Example input: Try out this sample input!! Simply cut and paste the
lines in the text body below and see if it works.
- ------------ beginning of text body ---------
begin-document
language hindi
This is a test input. This sentence should appear in English. The
sentence below is by Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru in Discovery of India which
will appear in Hindi.
##
bhaarata eka khoja
ek samay aisaa aataa hai jab puuraa raashhTra ek mahaan uddeshya kii
puurti ke lie aasthaabaddha ho jaataa hai aur tab itihaasa
parivartanashiil aur yugapravartak ban jaataa hai.
##
end-document
- ------------ end of text body ----------------
ITRANS currently supports
Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi (Devanagari font)
Bengali (Sonargaon font)
Gujarati (PostScript Type 1 font by Shrikrishna Patil)
Tamil (wntml font from U of Washington)
Telugu (from the TeluguTeX package)
For more help about using different languages and fontsizes,
send mail to itrans@yamuna.asd.sgi.com with subject "itrans help" and
include the following line in the body of the text.
help convert /* Only these two words on the line */
3. Generating crosswords for Indian fonts:
----------------------------------------
You can also generate crossword puzzles in any of the
fonts. This involves several details; for more information,
include the line
help crossword
in the body of your help request.
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------