South Asian transliteration with Vamana
Vamana is "Nanos for South Asian transliteration": it is a professional editing tool for publishing books or creating digital-library-ready texts in Sanskrit or other South Asian languages in Latin-alphabet transliteration. It is an essential tool for all South Asian digitization projects.
Vamana (Sanskrit for "dwarf") does for South Asian transliteration what Nanos does for Greek: just like Nanos, Vamana offers a Virtual Keyboard, in this case with all the character-and-diacritics combinations necessary for editing texts in South Asian languages in Latin-alphabet transliteration.
Just like Nanos, Vamana works with ready-made ("precomposite") characters that contain not just the base character, but also the diacritic(s). This ensures that all diacritics print and display perfectly, just as the font designer has designed them for the base character. Diacritics are not separate units that can be misaligned or distorted, but form an unseparable unit with the base character.
Vamana (like Nanos) is based on Unicode and saves text files in UTF-8 (or UTF-16) format. Vamana fully complies with ISO 10646 and ISO 15919.
Vamana is available for Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Windows. There are three versions of Vamana:
- Vamana for Linux and Solaris
- Vamana for Mac OS X
- Vamana for Windows
Currently, Vamana is only available in an English-language version.
We are in the process of creating a special Vamana website here in e-ternals.com, parallelling the one for Nanos. In the meantime, to get a copy of Vamana, please send an e-mail to:
Or contact:
Gunthard Müller
Silvanerring 10
D-55234 Bechtolsheim
Germany
Tel.: +49 (6733) 948936
Fax: +49 (6733) 808996
