more on coding "strange" languages, with apologies (36)

Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@VM.EPAS.UTORONTO.CA)
Wed, 12 Apr 89 20:55:28 EDT


Humanist Mailing List, Vol. 2, No. 825. Wednesday, 12 Apr 1989.

Date: Wed, 12 Apr 89 08:42:00 EDT
From: DEL2@phoenix.cambridge.ac.uk
Subject: Sanskrit coding


A quick response to the comments about Devanagari, Sanskrit and Pali:

The first one (Devanagari on a PC):
There is a WP program called ChiWriter which specialises in scientific,
mathematical and `foreign' text; Nagari is available on it and the results
(24-pin dot matrix, LaserJet-compatible and PostScript all supported) are very
acceptable. Write to Swabian Technology Ltd., P.O. Box 153, Oxford OX4 4BP,
U.K.

The second one (standard character codes for Sanskrit and Pali):

(a) there is surely no reason to assume that this or any other
scheme can or will become standard: a lot depends on the machine used, the
underlying character representation (e.g. some computers use EBCDIC not ASCII),
etc.; anyway translation between schemes can easily be automated; (b) if the
scheme really is intended for universal use it ought to contain lots more:
Vedic accented vowels, vowel+macron+breve, nasalised vowels written with tilde,
etc. And it is not safe to assume that upper case versions of some characters
will not be needed.

Douglas de Lacey
(DEL2@UK.AC.CAM.PHX)