Indica, an Indic preprocessor for TEX A Sinhalese TEX System

In this paper a two-fold project is described: the first part is a generalized preprocessor for Indic scripts (scripts of languages currently spoken in India—except Urdu—, Sanskrit and Tibetan), with several kinds of input (LTEX commands, 7-bit ascii, CSX, ISO/IEC 10646/unicode) and TEX output. This utility is written in standard Flex (the gnu version of Lex), and hence can be painlessly compiled on any platform. The same input methods are used for all Indic languages, so that the user does not need to memorize different conventions and commands for each one of them. Moreover, the switch from one language to another can be done by use of user-defineable preprocessor directives. The second part is a complete TEX typesetting system for Sinhalese. The design of the fonts is described, and METAFONT-related features, such as metaness and optical correction, are discussed. At the end of the paper, the reader can find tables showing the different input methods for the four Indic scripts currently implemented in Indica: Devanagari, Tamil, Malayalam, Sinhalese. The author hopes to complete the implementation of Indic languages into Indica soon; the results will appear in a forthcoming paper.