Dear Friends, Here is a new simple utility where you can generate texts in devanaagarii (Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit), Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu over ordinary Email. Once a structured, simple form of transliterated input is mailed to sanskrit@quite.net 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 language chosen in the input mail message. 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. A postscript viewer named Ghostview can be easily installed on any computer platform including Mac. For the procedure, and other details of the utility, please contact Atul Narkhede at atul@sgi.com. 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 program is capable of handling MIME encoded input, you should be able to invoke ghostview (or any other postscript viewer) automatically on the output message. Please get used to the transliteration rules to minimize errors. If one has access to world wide web, an on-line interface is also available where one 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://www.alkhemy.com/sanskrit/web-interface/itrans.html or contact Hari Adiseshu at hari@dworkin.wustl.edu for more information. The site includes transliteration rules for different languages. This utility should be useful in preparing multilingual documents, encoding poems/aticles/brochures/announcements/handouts, creating your own crossword puzzles, communicate in different languages directly. More help can be offered on individual basis. Please send a note with questions to atul@sgi.com. There are many benefits to using the procedure, only if you use them. We hope that your printing needs will be partially satisfied with this utility. Atul Narkhede -------------------------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 sanskrit@quite.net 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 sanskrit@quite.net (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!! %% 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 sanskrit@quite.net 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. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------