An Overview of Indic Fonts for T E X

Many scholars and students in the humanities have preferred TEX over other “word processors” or document preparation systems because of the ease TEX provides them in typesetting non-Roman scripts, the availability of TEX fonts of interest to them, and the ability TEX has in producing well-structured documents. However, this is not the case amongst Indologists. The lack of Indic fonts for TEX and the perceived difficulty of typesetting them have often turned Indologists away from using TEX. Little do they realize that TEX is the foremost tool for developing Indic language/script documents. With an increase over the past few years in the development and availability of Indic language and font packages, the introduction of other fonts and style packages, the flexibility of the LTEX2ε system, and the creation of TUGIndia (which may revolutionize the typesetting of Indic scripts) there is now even more reason for Indologists to implement TEX in their work. There are roughly thirteen major Indic scripts (Tibetan is included in this list) which are used throughout South Asia to write the major languages and dialects of the region. As of this article all of these major scripts can be typeset with TEX, the exception being Assamese (see Section 6). Not only is it fascinating that the major scripts of South Asia can be typeset with TEX, but the ease with which such a task can be accomplished is itself an amazing feat. Anyone who has ever tried writing a document with multiple non-Roman scripts and diacritic text in an environment other than TEX understands the complexity of such a task. TEX takes the user beyond such difficulties by facilitating the implementation of multiple scripts without the hassle of worrying about various fonts and their encodings, manual font switching, and other such hindrances to productivity caused by common “word processors”. TEX enables the incorporation of several nonRoman scripts within a single document through transliterated input of the scripts. Indic scripts are based on the phonetic template of the languages they represent, a template which is uniform in both the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian language families of India. Such uniformity in phonetics is reflected in orthography, which in turn enables all scripts to be transliterated through a single scheme. This uniformity has subsequently been reflected in the transliteration schemes of the Indic language/script packages. Most packages have their own transliteration scheme, but these schemes are essentially variations on a single scheme, differing merely in the coding of a few vowel, nasal, and retroflex letters. Most of these packages accept input in one of the two primary 7-bit transliteration schemes— ITRANS or Velthuis—or a derivative of one of them. There is also an 8-bit format called CS/CSX which a few of these packages support. CS/CSX is described in further detail in Section 3.