Subsections

• Ligature suppression
• Breaking lexical scan
  • List of all ITRANS recognized English letters
  
  
• Punctuation Issues
• Multi-consonant conjuncts
• Word endings and the #endwordvowel command

Usage Hints

Ligature suppression

As mentioned earlier, the system automatically uses ligatures whenever possible. For example, since the ta-ta ligature exists, input text of the form tti is printed as . If instead you need it to be printed as you have two choices. One, if you never want the ta-ta ligature to be used, you can edit the IFM file and comment out all the lines that refer to the ta-ta ligature. (The IFM file is a text file, for more information, see the technical documentation in tech.tex.)

On the other hand, if you do want to keep the ligature, except in a few locations in the input text (say for small point type), or if you do not want to edit the IFM file, you can use the ligature inhibitors {} to prevent a ligature from being used. Whenever the {} characters are inserted between two consonants, itrans refrains from using the ligature (if it exists, if it does not, then these characters have basically no effect). Instead, the half-forms of the consonants (as appropriate) are used. Thus, even if the IFM file contains the ta-ta ligature, the input text t{}ti always appears as .

Breaking lexical scan

Use the character _ after a consonant letter to break the lexical scan. This becomes necessary because of the default behavior of the scanner, which tries to match the largest possible input pattern. Thus, when you write ai in the transliterated text, it comes out as in marathi or in tamil. Now, that is just what you want for the ai vowel, but what if you wanted it to be scanned as two vowels: a, followed by i ? In such cases, you need to break the lexical scan, by following the first vowel, the a character, with the _ character to stop the scanner from associating i with the a preceding it. So, a_i in the input text results in: for marathi and for tamil.

This is a thing to watch out for in all cases where some character has a multiple letter mapping, and each letter by itself also represents some other character. In the above example, ai is the two letter map, and both a and i represent other vowels.

Note that if you wish to suppress any ligature, you should use the {} letters consecutively, as explained in the previous paragraph. Using _ to follow some consonant allows a ligature, if it exists for the consonant pair, to be used. (Of course, tamil does not have any ligatures.)

To get a printable underscore in the Indian language text, follow normal TEX usage--use backslash underscore--\_.

Since ITRANS supports many Indian languages, it has a large list of input tokens that are mapped to consonants. For example even if ai is not a vowel in one of the languages supported by ITRANS, it still is always recognized as the ai vowel, and thus if you need it to be recognized as the a and i vowels, use the _ character as mentioned above.

List of all ITRANS recognized English letters

Here's the list of ASCII input characters that are special to ITRANS:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
.a .c .N .n ^r .D .Dh A AUM
a aa ai au b bh ch chh D Dh d dh dny E e f G g gh GY
H h I i ii J j jh JN K k kh kSh L L^i L^I LLi LLI l ld
M m N "n ~n n ^n N^ ny O o OM p ph q
.r ^r .R R R^i R^I RRi RRI r S SRI s sh shh
T Th t th U u uu v x Y y z

#$<$language$>$

#end$<$language$>$

#$<$language$>$ifm

#$<$language$>$font

#output=HTML_7

#output=HTML_8

#output=UTF_8

#output=TeX

#output=PostScript

#ignoreshortmarkers

#useshortmarkers

#usecsx

#ignorecsx

#include=

#endwordvowel=a

#endwordvowel=.h

## {} _ `

Version 4.0 and onwards added support for the Classical Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit Extended encoding, which adds one ASCII character to the above list (c) and many non-ASCII characters, see the document icsx.itx for more details.

Punctuation Issues

The fonts provided may be missing some or all punctuation characters, some may also be missing numbers. For example, the tamil font used, wntml, does not have any numerals or any punctuation characters. The devanagari font does have numbers and some punctuation marks (the double-quote is missing, for example).

For devanagari, when using TEX, use the idevn.tex (automatically loaded by itrans.sty, use the \usepackage{itrans.sty} command in L^ATEX) which provides modes for setting a devanagari font, and offers many commands that ease devanagari input. See the ITRANS Song Book documents for examples of idevn.tex usage, or, check out the sample document file sample.itx.

In all punctuation problems, you can always get the required punctuation or digit character by ending the Indian language transliteration scope (using one of the endmarkers), then printing the required punctuation mark, and the restarting the transliteration by using the start marker.

An easier method, in TEX is to make use of the math mode for numbers. It is usually sufficient to use the $ enclosing scope to make numbers print correctly, since a $ enters mathmode and uses the math fonts. For punctuation marks, the user needs to explicitly change fonts: example:

#marathi ......{\rm ;}.......#endmarathi .

But that is preferable over this form:

#marathi ......#endmarathi ; #marathi .......#endmarathi .

Multi-consonant conjuncts

How does itrans handle ligatures with more than two consonants ? For example, shhTmii contains three consonants. This ligature produces , the way itrans works is as follows: Beginning with the first consonant in the list, itrans checks if a double-consonant ligature has been defined for that consonant and the next one in the list. If such a character exists, then it is used and both consonants are consumed, and itrans repeats the procedure for the next consonant.

There is one exception to the above rule: if at all possible, the last two consonants are handled together, that is if a ligature of the last two consonants exists, that is used over the pairing that would result from the above method. Example: shhTrii produces , both shha-Ta and Ta-ra ligatures exist, but since the consonants Ta and ra are the last two consonants, that ligature is used over shha-Ta.

Of course, this default behavior can be changed by appropriately placing the ligature inhibitor sequence, {}. Example: shhTr{}ii produces .

Also, in ITRANS version 5.10, ITRANS now supports direct specification of 3 or more consonant conjuncts in the .IFM file. So, if the above given description leads to incorrect output, we can now fix it by providing explicit rules for 3 or more multi-consonant conjuncts in the IFM file.

Word endings and the #endwordvowel command

To increase readability of the Indian text (in english), each word for the devanagari and bengali language is assumed to end in a vowel. Each Indian language letter can be generally written as C + [C + [C + [...] + C]] + V, where C is a consonant, and V is a vowel. When a consonant appears at the end of the word, and the vowel is ``a'', then it is not necessary to include the final ``a''--if a word ends in a consonant, ITRANS will automatically add the vowel ``a'' to the final consonant--for devanagari and bengali only. Thus, in hindi, instead of writing ``hama'', you can write ``ham'', which is how the word is pronounced anyway. To add a halant to any consonant, use ``.h'', thus ``ham.h'' produces .

Use this default mechanism only when it increases the readability, for example in hindi it is better to write ``ek'', ``is'', ``tab'', instead of ``eka'', ``isa'', ``taba'' for . But, it is better to include the ``a'' in words such as ``manushhya''--.

This default mechanism is activated only for the devanagari and bengali input. (The keyword DEFAULTVOWEL in the IFM file directs whether the last consonant in a word should be considered as paired the half-form, or the a-form, if the form is left unspecified.)

The above default working can be avoided by specifying the vowel to end words in the input document.

#endwordvowel=a

#endwordvowel=.h

The first command makes the default vowel be ``a'', which the second command will make the default vowel a ``half-form''--viraam. The endwordvowel command will override the DEFAULTVOWEL specification in the IFM file. So, for sanskrit, it is useful to include this command in the input file:

#endwordvowel=.h

which puts a viraam at the end of any word that does not end in a vowel.