LATEX and Indian Languages

Rupesh Kumar A
Assistant 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
 TE X

• 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 CS/CSX
eXtended
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 Jeroen Hellingman
(cuttack,konark)
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
or
TEXpert
Happy TEXing !!!