LATEX and Indian

Languages

LATEX and Indian

LanguagesRupesh Kumar AAssistant Professor

Department of Library & Information Science

Tumkur University, Tumkur

Rupesh Kumar AAssistant Professor

Department of Library & Information Science

Tumkur University, Tumkur

Can MS Word or Openoffice?

Do this?

Or this?

Scientific Publishing

• Open access• Publish or perish• Self-publishing• Self-archiving• Publishing process and

typesetting

TEX

• Markup language by Donald Knuth• Began in 1977; present version released

in 1982; enhancements in 1989• Consistent & attractive typesetting• High typographic quality• Same quality output on different

computers• Stable & virtually bug free• Pronounced “Tech” (hard ‘k’)

LATEX

• Typesetting system by Leslie Lamport• Set of macros• TEX formatting engine• Highly complex & structured documents• Current version LATEX2e• mathematics, engineering, computer

science, economics, linguistics…• Pronounced “lay-tech” or “lah-tech”

Features

• Open source & stable• Strict rules on structure &

formatting• Time consuming• Programmable desktop publishing• Highly complex notations• High compatibility• Low hardware requirements

Advantages

• Professionally crafted layouts• Convenient typesetting of equations• Content independent of layout• Complex structures generated

easily• Free add-on packages• Free & highly portable

‘Dis’advantages

• Time consuming• Hard to write unstructured

documents• Fussy: output rendered only

after error-free compiling

Using LATEX

• No special knowledge required• Computer literacy

• Plain text editing• File manipulation (create, open, save, etc.)• Uncompress/unwrap files

• Software Prerequisites• A text editor

• LATEX binaries and style sheets

• A DVI viewer to view & print the final document

TEX in India

• India: a typesetter for Western World

• TEX usage not volunteered by authors

• Means of livelihood for typesetters• Accustomed to WYSIWYG* software• Meager use

*What You See Is What You Get

ITRANS

• Bundling Indian scripts with LATEX

• By Avinash Chopde• Preprocessor to convert Indic text

input to Indian language script• Supports all major Indian

languages

Indic Fonts in ITRANS

Language Font

Bengali itxbeng, bwti

Hindi, Marathi Sanskrit devnac, devnag

Gujarati itxguj

Classical Sanskrit/ Classical Sanskrit eXtended

CS/CSX

Kannada Kantex

Punjabi (Gurmukhi) Pundoc

Romanized Devanagari Romancsx

Tamil Wntml

Telugu tlgutx

Other Indic Fonts

Language Font/preprocessor

Developed by

Kannada kannadatex Jun Takashima

Bengali Arosgaon Muhammad Masroor Ali

Sanskrit Sanskrit Charles Wikner

Gurmukhi Gurmukhi Amarjit Singh

Malayalam Malayalam-TeX Jeroen Hellingman

Oriya Oriyatex (cuttack,konark)

Jeroen Hellingman

Tamil tamilize Thomas Ridgeway

Telugu teluguTeX Lakshmi V S Mukkavilli

Assamese, Brahmi In Progress… In Progress…

• Use LATEX and encourage its use

• High visibility• Easy accessibility• Boost R & D

So…you want to be…

TEXnician

orTEXpert

Happy TEXing !!!