Vedic Sanskrit-on the way of Digitization

Vedic Sanskrit; on the way of Digitization
Siji Sunny,Jui Mhatre
CDAC Mumbai,India
Introduction
Vedic Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language exhaustively used to preserve and spread Indian wisdom through oral mode. The
utterances of Vedic mantras and prayers were authenticated by an exhaustive sign system with intonation marks developed
when the Vedic text was written down.
Font design in context to Vedic Sanskrit language is a challenge considering its complex orthographic structure, multitier us
ages of diacritic marks of complex compositions, signs that appear above, below and at sides of the base character, integrated
multiconsonant conjuncts, multiple syllabic combinations.
The text process Engine IndiX changed the concept of Simple script like Latin to complex scripting like Vedic Sanskrit. IndiX
has based the grouping and reordering of characters on the Unicode standard and the minimal model of fonts. IndiX uses the
ISO/IEC Technical Report 15285, which gives an recommendation for indic text processing.
The complexity of Vedic Sanskrit is implemented by IndiX followed by font processing. 5Tier Vedic Sanskrit OpenType font has
been designed recently under Project IndiX using undefined Unicode values at CDAC (Centre for Development of Advanced
Computing, under Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Govt. of India).
Indian oral tradition (Background)
Sanskrit has its own place recognized by the linguists all over the world. It is one of the most ancient languages of the world
and has molded the Indian culture, rich Indian traditions and the Indian thought systems in the fields of Arts, Sciences and Phi
losophy. Sanskrit at the period of Vedas was exhaustively used to preserve and spread Indian wisdom through oral mode. The
ancient sacred Vedas are reservoir of information, knowledge and wisdom of Indian past. This knowledge has been passed on
from the teacher to the student using oral mode and its associate techniques such as recitation, repetition, memorization and
oral reproductions etc. Clear and correct pronunciations of syllabic clusters by the teacher as well as attentive and meaningful
listening by the pupils were integral parts of this methodology.
The utterances of Vedic mantras and prayers, were authenticated by an exhaustive sign system with intonation marks devel
oped when the Vedic text was written down, thus providing a model of parallence in linguistic sounds and their orthographic
equivalences.
Preservation of the ancient wisdom
In order to preserve this ancient knowledge for the future generations there is a need to store this information which can be
possible in the digital world today. Digital text generation in Vedic Sanskrit language is a means to maintain and pass this wis
dom further. However Type font design and implementation of Indian scripts and languages for inputing, displaying and printing
is complex as compared to Roman script. Text in Roman script generally appears in a linear way whereas Indian scripts have
specific orthographic behavior.
Font design in context to Vedic Sanskrit language
Text in Roman script generally appears in a linear way whereas Indian scripts have specific orthographic behavior.

is a challenge considering its complex orthographic structure, multitier usages of diacritic marks of complex compositions, vari
ous signs that appear above, below and at sides of the base character, integrated multiconsonant conjuncts, multiple syllabic
combinations.
Diagram – 5 tier structure of Vedic Sanskrit

The range of characters
Given the complex 5 tier structure of Vedic Sanskrit text, the font demands adequate range of characters as well as exhaustive
rendering rules to achieve the advanced typographic quality. The range includes vowel signs, vowel modifying signs, consonant
signs, half forms of consonant signs, consonant modifying signs, integrated multiple consonant syllables (conjuncts) ranging
from integrated 2, 3, 4 and 5 consonant integrated conjuncts, various other signs to show nuances of spoken language like time
duration, stress, vibration as well as specific intonation signs.
Diagram Range of characters
The Rules
An exhaustive number of compositional rules and tables are applied to the font in order to generate text and the complex

syllabic structure of Vedic Sanskrit. Various rules for joineries, combining characters (conjuncts), variant glyph forms,
substitution of glyphs (characters), positioning of vowel signs and intonation signs above or below the vowel signs are written to
obtain the orthographic and linguistic needs of Vedic Sanskrit language.
Diagram Output through Substitution and Positioning tables
Vedic Sanskrit font contains 1174 characters (glyphs) in total with tables that include 10 Features, 36 Substitution lookups, 6
Positioning lookups, 82 ligature rules, 68 glyph groups, 253 consonant conjunct ligatures.
Diagram – Testing of Vedic Sanskrit font

This font with the help of exhaustive rules and font processing can generate about 24,702 multiple syllabic combinations. The
information, the knowledge and the wisdom of Indian culture/tradition will be now exposed globally.
Rendering Vedic Sanskrit IndiX
Rendering of Latin (Internationalized) text is often assumed to be simply matter of one to one mapping. All languages are
thought to be like English where it is simply a matter picking the right symbols from the font and displaying by the help of
rendering engine in the order they occur in the memory representation this view internationalized rendering is very simple.
But in indic script specially in Vedic Sanskrit the unit of orthography is based on syllable,which consists of one or more
characters that can be rendered by a sequence of glyphs.
For Getting Vedic Sanskrit support in GNU/LINUX platform we used Indix library as for rendering the Vedic Text  followed by
font processing.
Indix rendering engine, takes text content  and formatting information  and displays the formatted content on the screen. It
"paints" on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer. Currently This rendering engine is  used
for Mozilla Browser and Moziila composer for displaying (and editing) of Vedic  contents.
Developing a local language capability at system level is better than developing it in application level,Indix followed was to
make changes to the software at the core level modified the lowermost layer of X window system, the Xserver to support Vedic
Sanskrit.

Object Model For Characters Indix
Indix analyased and Enabled the same way how the X11 server handles the fonts and converts Latin text characters to glyphs
on the window screen,IndiX bases its characters to glyphs processing on the ISO/IEC 10646 model with small modification.
So, for example, all the characters of an Indic syllable are treated as an indivisible unit like a single Latin character and
presented for conversion to glyph at the lowermost level of the font. It is the font that has to form conjuncts and other shapes
and place them appropriately. In IndiX these operations are not carried out at the higher levels as a text layout operation.

Indix Architectural Diagram
In the X server the text is separated into Indic and non Indic runs based on the Unicode range alloted to the Indic script. But in
Vedic Sanskrit yet Unicode is not allocated any values so we used 0880 serious values for the Vedic symbols and defined
these values in Indix Client library.

The indic sequence broken into syllable,the characters are recored to facilitate proper display of the forms those characters.
After these transformation ,the text is shaped. Using the CharMap in the font,the char codes are converted to glyph
indices.Using substitution rules,groups of glpyh indices are converted to indices of their ligature or alternate forms.Then using
information from the font,the final glyph are positioned.This has been done by OpenType font,that include the substitution and
postilioning  rules appropriate to the type faces with in the font
Most display system have an efficient glyph rastering machinery that can take a sequence of glyph, scale the glyph outline
according to the point size and scaling of the display window,grid fit the points on the outline and scan convert the outline to
bitmap relative positioning of the glyphs is generally decided by the glyph metrics and so the machinery can rasterize a glyph
sequence fast. This rasterised pixmap can be displayed by most devices in hardware .
Input Methodology for Vedic Sanskrit
There are two ways to map Devanagari keyboard on X window, using X Keyboard Extension (XKB) and using xmodmap. We
had created a keyboard map file for xmodmap. By using  the utility xmodmap to map Vedic keyboard.Normally xmodmap is
used to load a keyboard configured file.For most Linux distributions, when you start X window with startx, X server will find
Xmodmap in /etc/X11/ first. And by using a single line command  can start Vedic typing.
Acknowledgment
We acknowledge Mr Zia Saquib, Executive Director, CDAC Mumbai and Dr Alka Irani, Language Computing group, CDAC
Mumbai,Professor.R.K.Joshi  and Vinod Kumar .
REFERENCES
1        IBM and others. International Components for Unicode(ICU 2.8 Documentation, 2003)
2        IndiX homepage http://www.cdacmumbai.in/projects/indix
3 Sandeep Rao, Vinod Kumar,  Standards for Visual sequence of characters for Indic Scripts, CDAC Mumbai, Mar
2005
4 Edwin Hart, Alan Griffee. An operational model for characters and glyphs. Technical report ISO/IEC TR 15285, 1998
5. R.K.Joshi ,Dr.T.N.Dharmadhikari and Dr.Vijay Vasudev Bedeker,2931 October 2007 “The Phonemic approach for
Indian Text with Special Reference To Sanskrit The first International Sanskrit Computational Linguistic Symposium and
Workshop organised by INRIA at Rocquencourt,Versalles,France

Vedic Sanskrit-on the way of Digitization

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Vedic Sanskrit-on the way of Digitization