Subsections

• Direct Text (HTML) Output Requirements
• HTML Output - Unicode - UTF-8

Direct Text Output - for HTML

This is a new mode added in release 5.1, which just like the PostScript mode, does not offer any typesetting functionality. In fact, this mode is provided for generating text that can be displayed on any WWW browser such as Netscape (version 3.0 or later). Not all languages are supported in this mode -- it requires availablity of a TrueType font, and right now (ITRANS 5.10) the following languages are supported: Romanized Sanskrit, Gujarati, Bengali, and Devanagari scripts.

Two types of HTML output are supported: 7-bit ASCII (which uses the &#nnn HTML codes for character codes 127 to 255), and 8-bit text output (which outputs character codes 127 to 255 directly). I think 7-bit output should be more portable, but in practice, I found it to create problems on Macintosh computers, so, I use 8-bit output in the examples.

Three platforms have been tested: Unix/X11R6 (Type 1 fonts - *.pfa or *.pfb), Macintosh (TrueType - *.hqx files), and Windows (TryeType - *.ttf). All the fonts required are present in the ITRANS/lib/fonts directory of the ITRANS package, the user has to install the appropriate font on his or her system to allow viewing of the ITRANS output in the native Indic Script.

Direct Text (HTML) Output Requirements

The font should be available in Type 1 or TrueType format, and must be usable in regular word-processors (without ITRANS).

HTML Output - Unicode - UTF-8

ITRANS 5.3 added support for Unicode output using UTF-8 encoding for the output.

The UTF-8 text output can be displayed on any Web browser or loaded into any text editor that can handle UTF-8 text. To view the text in Indian language scripts requires availability of an Unicode font, for the specific language. ITRANS does not come with any Unicode fonts, it is expected that in due time, there will be freeware Unicode fonts for all Indian languages available on the Internet.

Table 1: ITRANS: Unicode IFM files.

Sanskrit/Hindi/Marathi	udvng.ifm
Gujarati	uguj.ifm
Bengali	ubeng.ifm
Tamil	utml.ifm
Telugu	utel.ifm
Kannada	ukan.ifm
Romanized Sanskrit	uroman.ifm
Gurmukhi	ugur.ifm
Malayalam	umal.ifm
Oriya	uoriya.ifm

The Oriya and Malayalam scripts are supported through the Unicode interface only - these scripts are not supported in the TEX or PostScript interfaces.