Sanskrit Software for Mac?

[Sara Bara]

Namaskar! Does anyone know where to get Sanskrit (devanagri) conversion/translation software for Mac?

[Ted Lemon]

What transliteratiion scheme do you need?

The reason I ask is that I have written some software for the Mac that transliterates from the ACIP transliteration to Sanskrit Unicode. But that's got a limited audience - most people seem to use Sanskrit 99 on Windows. Have you tried the Unicode Devanagari font on Mac? Does it look okay to you?

If that font is okay, what about the transliteration - which do you use?

[Sara Bara]

Hi Ted, I don't know anything about how ACIP works, and I don't even know what unicode means. :(

On my Windows PC (at work) I use itranslator but they don't have a mac version.

I am just looking for something into which I can type the words in transliteration, and it will spit out the devanagri, which I would like to copy/paste into MS Word.

Ted Lemon said:

What transliteratiion scheme do you need?

The reason I ask is that I have written some software for the Mac that transliterates from the ACIP transliteration to Sanskrit Unicode. But that's got a limited audience - most people seem to use Sanskrit 99 on Windows. Have you tried the Unicode Devanagari font on Mac? Does it look okay to you?

If that font is okay, what about the transliteration - which do you use?

[Ted Lemon]

Ah, okay. Itranslator is indeed Sanskrit 99. The transliteration scheme is what you type. There are lots of different systems. For example, the Monier-Williams dictionary program uses tokyo, so for example prajnya (wisdom) is transliterated praJJa (I think!).

Anyway, the easiest thing to try is to enable the devanagari input method. To do this, start System Preferences, and choose International. From there, choose Input Menu. There are two Devanagari input methods: Devanagari and Devanagari QWERTY. Check them both. Also check Show Input Method in Menu Bar. You should see a little american flag appear in the menu bar. If you click on that, you can pull down one of the Devanagari keyboards.

ऊपाल बदह मोल ूबजा तगका ूपगे

(That's what happens when you type "then you can type like this".)

I don't have any documentation for what key does what, but if you fiddle with it I think you can figure it out. QWERTY is probably easier to figure out, but that's just a guess.

[Sara Bara]

Thanks Ted. I tried this but I am stumped. When I view your reply, it shows up as question marks for the text that is supposedly in devangri. When I go to MS Word to type in devangri, it shows up as squares. I've tried both Qwerty and the other, same result. Any suggestions? Is there some system setting that I need to check-box to view it? Thanks for your help!

[Ted Lemon]

Possibly you don't have the devanagari onts installed. Which version of mac os x are you running? Do you have the install disk? If you do, put it in and see if you can find the international fonts package on it. If you can find it, install it and see if anything changes.

Also, try this first in TextEdit. And if you use firefox, make sure it's firefox 3 - version 2 is a carbon app and may not support Unicode. Unicode is the unified coding system that lets you write text in any script on your computer - a very nice system. Works on pretty much all modern operating systems, but some older programs don't support it.