Sanskrit resources
We provide various resources here for those interested in Sanskrit.
As new resources are provided we will either publish them or link to them from this page.
General info
- IAST diacritics (wikipedia)
- IAST to Devanagari Unicode converter (convert transliterated Sanskrit to Devanagari)
- Analyze Unicode used for Devanagari (helpful for figuring out what fonts should work)
E-Publishing with diacritics
Publishing books in electronic format with diacritics can be done in MOBI format using the free Calibre software.
Since MOBI doesn't support font embedding, it's necessary to use Unicode characters. One conversion tool is at http://bvml.org/books/fonts/convertor.html. Another (for Balaram to Unicode) taken from the original Gaudiya Grantha Mandir code, is below.
Nowadays nearly all computers and all e-book readers use a default font supporting a large number of characters from the various Unicode groups.
- Some of the Unicode groups useful for diacritics are:
- Latin Extended-A, containing ĀāĪīŚśŪū
- Latin Extended Additional, containing ḌḍḤḥḶḷḸḹṚṛṜṝṢṣṬṭ
- Some noteworthy quirks:
- When reading converted mobi files on the iPhone (using the Kindle app) the characters with diacritics appear in a different font. Annoying but still legible. No such problem exists on the Kindle.
- Using text-to-speech on the Kindle will fail rather spectacularly. It doesn't know about Unicode with diacritics and falls back to finding the closest words it knows about.
Paste text you want converted here (can be an entire book):
Write to browser window (requires allowing popups)
Download as HTML file
Input uses Balaram encoding
Output as html source:
Output as html:
