The devanagari font is called devnac, and its PostScript description resides in the file devnac.ps. It is a user-defined type III PostScript font. Four fonts, variations on the basic devnac font, are bundled with the itrans package. Their names (in the TEX interface) are dnh, dnho, dnhrc, and dnhre.
Since these are PostScript fonts, you can use them at any font size in your document. In fact, the font size must be specified when loading in the font. In this document (and in idoc.itx), the following line was used for loading the font:
\newfont{\devnf}{dnh at 15pt}.
Even though this document has been typeset using a 11 point size, the devanagari font is loaded in at 15 point size. This is just to emphasize the devanagari characters. Normally, I would suggest loading in the font at 15-20% greater size than the other text in the document. So, if your document is being typeset at 11 point, load in the devanagari fonts using a 13 point size. Of course, this relation of size is important only if you wish to mix english and devanagari in the same document. In any case, go wild, experiment with various font sizes. Since the characters are described as outlines in bezier curve form, smaller point sizes do not look too good on a 300dpi output device, the larger the font size, the better the shapes look.
In ITRANS version 5.2, apart from the addition of a new style file named itrans.sty, a font definition file for Devnac was also added. The file is named Udvnc.fd, and it can be used to load this font using LATEX2e commands where the font encoding is U (unknown) and the font family is dvnc. Thus, the following can be used to load the medium series with normal shape:
\usefont{U}{dvnc}{m}{n}
and then to select a size and baselineskip:
\fontsize{18pt}{24pt}\selectfont
The above will load the dnh version of this font.
\usefont{U}{dvnc}{b}{sl}
will load the dnho version, and
\usefont{U}{dvnc}{c}{n}
will load the dnhrc version, and
\usefont{U}{dvnc}{bx}{n}
will load the dnhre version.
A direct PostScript interface is supported. HTML and Unicode (UTF-8) are not supported for this font.
This interface does not offer any wordprocessing capabilities other than that of checking when a page is complete, and then resetting the current point to the top of the next page. Thus, all spaces, lines, etc from the input text appear in the output too.
For the PostScript mode, the user may also directly invoke PostScript commands to create various versions of the font, as required. Refer to PostScript language manuals for specific help regarding the PostScript font manipulation commands. If you decide to go this route, take a look at the file itrans.pro, it is the prologue that gets sent to the printer. It contains definitions of various commands such as normalfont, slantfont, compressedfont, etc, which may be used to change the font being used. These PostScript functions take a single argument: the font size to use. All this and more information can be obtained from the prologue file, itrans.pro, and PostScript users should take a look at it. For example usage, look through the sample input files provided. Files ending in .ips are the direct PostScript input files, itrans (with the -P option) directly produces PostScript output for these files.
The file devnac.ps contains the PostScript language program for this devanagari font.
The single IFM file dvnc.ifm can be used for Sanskrit, Hindi or Marathi output.
The marathi form of ra-half is available through the R character, the second LA is at L (or ld), etc. The table displays the complete mapping from English to Devanagari for all the three Indic Scripts.
IFM file to use is named udvng.ifm.
Unicode (UTF-8) output is supported for this the Devanagari script, but no Unicode fonts are included with the ITRANS package. There are many Unicode fonts available on the Web, and more are being developed so it should be easy to locate a Unicode font when needed. Not all Unicode fonts fully support Indian Languages yet.
2009-12-04
ITRANS Home Page: http://www.aczoom.com/itrans/