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ITRANS
Version 5.20, September 1998
freeware
© 1991-1998, Avinash Chopde

A package for printing text in Indian Language Scripts.


As of September 1998, this page now describes the latest ITRANS release: ITRANS 5.2.
Visit ITRANS 5.1 for info on the previous release, which is in more widespread use right now.


Note: I am starting a new project, to develop a new software package that will make it easier to support all Indic Scripts in all sorts of Display (X11, MS-Windows, Mac, etc.) as well as Print (TeX, PostScript, etc.) systems.
Visit the Indic Scripting Package - IScript home page for more information.


Index of info on this page...
(use given links, or just scroll through this web page)

[[-->]] WWW ITRANS Documents Archives

Many documents in ITRANS format are now available on the Web, in various collections-- Hindi film song lyrics, Sanskrit documents, etc.

[[-->]] ITRANS 5.2 -- released Sep 1998.

[[-->]] ITRANS Tools

These are tools that make it easier to use ITRANS. There is one tool that provides direct ITRANS processing using your WWW browser, and another that provides a ITRANS by e-mail server, etc. You may prefer using these tools for ITRANS processing, instead of installing and using ITRANS directly, which is not a very easy process!

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ITRANS - Indian Language Transliteration Package
Version 5.20

© 1991-1998 by Avinash Chopde. All Rights Reserved.

Devanagari (Sanskrit/Hindi/Marathi), Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, and Romanized Sanskrit script output.

The input text to ITRANS is in a transliterated form, each letter in an Indian Script is assigned an English equivalent, and the English letters are used to construct what will eventually print out in the Indian Language Script.

ITRANS offers a choice of two input encodings: ITRANS Encoding, and the CS/CSX encoding. ITRANS encoding is a 7-bit ASCII encoding, while the CS/CSX encoding is a 8-bit encoding. The ITRANS encoding requires multi-character English code be used to represent each Indic Script letter, while the CS/CSX encoding uses a one-character code to represent each Indic Script letter. [See ITRANS/doc/icsx.itx in the ITRANS archive for more details regarding CS/CSX.]

ITRANS has three kinds of input interfaces: one or TeX documents, one for raw PostScript commands documents, and a third for HTML documents. The TeX interface is available for all languages, while the PostScript interface is available for PostScript fonts only, and the HTML interface is available for PostScript or TrueType fonts only. Currently, the PostScript and HTML interfaces are available for these languages: Devanagari (Xdvng), Bengali (ItxBeng), Gujarati (ItxGuj), and Romanized Sanskrit (CSutopia or Wnri).



ITRANS 5.20 New Features

ITRANS 5.20 is completely compatible with the older ITRANS 5.1 or 4.04 release, so any documents encoded in ITRANS 5.1 or 4.04 will work correctly with ITRANS 5.20.

Here's a list of major new features added to ITRANS 5.20 (for a complete list, look at the CHANGES file present in the ITRANS archive).

[[*]] New fonts added.

Bwti, a Bengali font, and Pun, a Gurmukhi font for Punjabi, added to ITRANS.

[[*]] Input encoding extended with new codes.

ITRANS 5.1 is fully compatibile with ITRANS 4.04 encoding. A few new codes are now also accepted: Added additional ITRANS codes:
RRi == R^i RRI == R^I
LLi == L^i LLI == L^I
' == .a (only when #usecsx is in effect)
For bengali:
Added "Y" (yya in the IFM file), and changed: f --> Y
Added "J" (jadot in the IFM file), now y, z == J.

Jump to the Transliteration Map for a complete listing of the ITRANS encoding.

[[*]] #include= command searches for files in more directories.

#include=<filename> added as a new ITRANS command, this command will behave as if the given file name was copied in at that point. Can appear anywhere in the document, and can have nested #include commands (to some maximum). This command now searches for <filename> in all directories defined in the environment variable ITRANSPATH.

[[*]] #endfont= command added.

Added #endfont=<string> and extended #<langfont>, mainly for ease of use with direct HTML output mode of ITRANS. Usage:
#endfont=</FONT> % this is a global command, for all languages
....
#hindifont=<FONT FACE="Xdvng"> % this is language specific
now, every #hindi will then print <FONT FACE="Xdvng"> & any #end<lang> will print </FONT>




Download ITRANS 5.2 from here.

Warning: Installing and using ITRANS is a non-trivial task, and unless you already know TeX or PostScript, and have installed freeware packages such as TeX or GhostScript on your DOS or Unix platform, it may not be worth your while to enter into a struggle with ITRANS!
Instead, it may be easier to use the ITRANS-WWW interactive tool, or the ITRANS-Email server; tools that are described elsewhere on this page.

ITRANS archives may be available in ZIP'ed format only (.zip file extension). This package is distributed as source code, and includes two executables: itrans.linux for Linux (ELF format) systems, itrans.exe or itrans16.exe for DOS/Win x86 systems. Users on other platforms need to have access to a compiler and other development tools to create an executable.

The itrans52 archive contains source code and documentation. The itransfn archive contains some of the freely available fonts needed to use supported language scripts of ITRANS, and itransxt archive contains some more fonts that may be restrictively licensed (such as GNU GPL), and additional tools that may of use with ITRANS. The itransps archive contain PostScript versions of all documents, you can use this to print or view the manuals for all language scripts supported by ITRANS, without installing ITRANS and all the fonts, etc. The itransht archive contains HTML versions of all documents, these are also available for online browsing here.

The current version of ITRANS 5.2 is now available, and you can FTP it from the following site: ftp://ftp.aczone.com/pub/itrans/

[Note: use your browsers "Save to Disk" command instead of directly clicking on the following links - for Netscape on Unix, click with the Right-Mouse button over link.]

Some additional binaries are available:




ITRANS 5.20 Encoding for Devanagari (Hindi/Marathi/Sanskrit)

This section describes the ITRANS encoding, for Devanagari. This is the basic encoding used for all Indic language scripts. Consult the individual language manuals in the ITRANS archive (ITRANS/doc/*.itx files, also available for online browsing) for exact details on every language supported by ITRANS.
Vowels (dependent and independent):
-------
a      aa/A    i      ii/I     u       uu/U 
RRi/R^i    RRI/R^I       LLi/L^i    LLI/L^I
e      ai        o      au         aM      aH

Consonants:
----------- 
k     kh     g     gh     ~N
ch    Ch     j     jh     ~n
T     Th     D     Dh     N
t     th     d     dh     n
p     ph     b     bh     m
y     r      l     v / w
sh    Sh     s     h      L
x / kSh     GY / j~n / dny     shr
R (for marathi half-RA)
L / ld (marathi LLA)
Y (bengali)

Consonants with a nukta (dot) under them (mainly for Urdu devanagari):
-----------------------------------------
k  with a dot:      q
kh with a dot:      K
g  with a dot:      G
j  with a dot:      z / J
p  with a dot:      f
D  with a dot:      .D
Dh with a dot:      .Dh

Specials/Accents:
-----------------
Anusvara:       .n / M / .m  (dot on top of previous consonant/vowel)
Avagraha:       .a    (`S' like symbol basically to replace a after o)
Ardhachandra:   .c    (for vowel sound as in english words `cat' or `talk')
Chandra-Bindu:  .N    (chandra-bindu on top of previous letter)
Halant:		.h    (to get half-form of the consonant - no vowel - virama)
Visarga:        H     (visarga - looks like a colon character)
Om:		OM, AUM (Om symbol)



List of sites that archive ITRANS documents

There are many WWW and FTP sites that store documents in ITRANS format. The documents can be retrieved in their input format which is the transliterated form in English, or in the output format which displays the text in the Indian Language Script. The Indian Language Script output is generally in the form of a PostSript file or a GIF image.

The documents in all these archives have been created by hundreds of WWW net-citizens, and these archives of Indian Language documents continue to grow with the efforts of numerous interested people all over the world... all this is yet another example that reflects the power of the Internet!

Here is the list of the archives:




ITRANS tools: WWW, E-mail processing, etc

As has been pointed out many times by many people, ITRANS is very cumbersome to install and very hard to use. So, naturally, as time passes, we find that some enterprising people have developed tools to get around that problem of ``being difficult-to-use''!

Here's the list of some tools that make using ITRANS easier:



Online Documentation

Using the Latex2html ITRANS extensions made by Ross Moore, all the documents in ITRANS are available in online form. This requires using the latest Latex2html (version 98.2b6 or later), which is a Beta version as of Sep 1998, available from: http://cdc-server.cdc.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/~latex2html/. For additional info on using Latex2HTML with ITRANS, visit the ITRANS/contrib/ directory for the latex2html.txt file which contains Ross's original instructions with some comments I added, and the mkl2h script I used to generate these documents. These two files are available in the itransNN.zip archive.

The online documents:

All the Indic Script text in the following HTML files is displayed using .GIF images.

Here are all the more more detailed language manuals:

Some example documents:

Note: the above HTML format uses GIF images for Indic text, printing these pages will result in poor quality output. For good quality output, use the PostScript files present in the itransps.zip archive.




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Last modified: 15 Sep, 1998.

Copyright © 1998 Avinash Chopde, avinash@acm.org. All rights reserved.

Page URL: http://www.aczone.com/itrans/