- Holding down the Option key when Keyboard Viewer is open shows you all the available diacritics. Here's how that looks on a European keyboard:
The above steps are explained in greater detail on PennState University's pages.
With Microsoft® Windows®
- Download a little application called Translit 1.2 made by French TM-Sidha Bertrand Canac.
Since the original download page seems to be down, I’ve now put the little .EXE file on my own homepage. This probably means that when installing it, you’ll have to ignore a warning that this app is from an unreliable source. Anyway, do a good malware check on it before installing! Also, you’ll have to change the extension from EXX to EXE, as Yola doesn’t allow .EXE files…
- Install it in an easy-to-find place, or better: put it into your Autostart folder, so it starts automatically whenever you switch on the computer.
It's small, and easy to quit if ever it gets in the way of other applications' commands.
If you’re using Windows XP, please also have a look at the extra points for you further down this page.
- When Translit is running, you can type letters with diacritics through these key combinations:
.
Some remarks about Translit 1.2:
- Translit doesn't have a key combination for the r with macron above and dot below (the double-length vocalic r).
- When installing Translit, you’ll probably get an error message like "File MSVCR71.dll not found". You can download the missing file here. This is a .ZIP archive, so you have to take out the .dll file and put it in the same folder as TRANSLIT_1_2.EXE, so it can't miss it :-)
(To know what is going on there *really*, techies may want to read this.)
- In Windows 10, another error message comes up, about the small icon that Translit wants to install in the taskbar, but it seems you can just close that message and forget about it. I’m not sure what’s causing this; please let me know if things work differently for you.
- Double-click the taskbar icon to temporarily suspend Translit; right-click on it if you want to stop it altogether.
Other methods to type Sanskrit transliteration on Windows PCs:
- Have a look on PennState University's pages. Some minor points there apply only to the PCs on their campus, but they don't get in the way and you'll have no problem spotting them anyway.
- One more alternative, if you use a German keyboard generally: the Europa-Tastatur, which works much like "ABC Extended" described above in the macOS section. This layout may at some point become the standard on German PCs.
About fonts/typefaces
Not all fonts can give you all the special characters you need for Sanskrit transliteration!
In Windows, some fonts include just this small subset:
āīūñś / ĀĪŪÑŚ.
On Macs, most fonts have either the full set or none at all.
The good news is that the most-used fonts like Times, Verdana, etc., on both Macs and PCs (from Windows 7) include the complete set of special characters for IAST:
āḍēḥīḷḹṃṁṇṅñōṛṝṣśṭū
(You may notice that the line above also demonstrates that web browsers often have their own ideas of how to render such stuff, with varying success.)
So, after all, chances are it'll be OK for you. Just remember: If you see squares where special characters should be, it's an indication that the font you're currently using doesn't have what it takes. The same is true if the special characters look different than the ones without diacritics: when the font you are using doesn't have a needed "glyph", as it's called, Windows often sneaks one in from a different font.
Online input methods
These naturally work on all computers, as long as the browser version is not too old.
Transliteration:
• http://www.learnsanskrit.org/tools/sanscript
• http://www.lexilogos.com/keyboard/sanskrit_latin.htm
Devanagari:
• Google Translate (Hindi) lets you choose between Inscript (the standard in India) and Phonetic (easier for people used to a western keyboard layout, especially QWERTY).
A third option there: typing a kind of transliteration which, when you press the space bar, is converted to Devanagari. Naturally, this uses a Hindi word list, meaning that you may have problems with Sanskrit. E.g., when I type "brahman" or "brhman" and then press the space bar, it is converted to ब्राह्मण. To get ब्रह्मन, I have to then press Backspace twice and select the desired word from a pop-up list. There may be a way to tell it to drop the vowel (like entering a halant/virāma) but I haven't found it yet.
• Another lexilogos page:
http://www.lexilogos.com/keyboard/sanskrit_devanagari.htm
That Lexilogos site seems to be a great resource! (Sorry, I haven’t tried any of them; please let me know how you fared with them!)
Although it’s not listed in their menu, they even have a page to input Vedic Sanskrit (in Devanagari) and a nice-looking font (Siddhanta) to download which includes the necessary glyphs for that.
For Windows XP users
Built-in fonts:
Windows XP comes with older versions of Times and other standard fonts, which do not include the full character set yet, and I’d recommend you “borrow” newer versions from a friend with Windows 7 or newer and install them instead of the old versions. (Right after doing that, you should restart the computer.)
Third-party fonts:
Alternatively, if you use Windows XP, you could
decide to download one of the many good free fonts available on the
internet. (It should be a .TTF font, not .OTF.) I personally like Linux Libertine.
There’s one possible problem with using third-party fonts: if you send a .DOC using any non-standard font to someone, it will look different on their computer, because they don't have that particular font installed. You could of course send them the fonts as well, hoping they'll manage to install them. Or, if your software allows you to create a .PDF file with embedded fonts, you can send that instead of a .DOC file. Then the receiver will see the document exactly as you had formatted it.
Please let me know how you're doing, compatibility-wise etc.:
These are good days for Sanskrit. Jai Guru Dev!
Gé
PS
Custom keyboard layouts for Windows
Last
thought: If needed, I could create a custom keyboard layout for Windows
and put it up here for download. The problem is: people's ideas of what
is easy to remember and easy to type vary greatly, so let me know how
you'd want it and we'll see. Also, you'd have to install and activate
such a keyboard layout, which isn't hard, except maybe the first time...
The free Microsoft tool for creating custom keyboard layouts for Windows, MSKLC, is now rather obsolete. Up to Windows 7, things still work, but to this day, I haven’t succeeded to install an MSKLC keyboard layout in Windows 10. Others have done it, I hear, so if you’re interested, give it a try.
But there is an alternative: KbdEdit can do all MSKLC could and more – and it’s working flawlessly under Windows 10. It even imports MSKLC’s layouts, so if you want to save money and don’t mind MSKLC’s convoluted installation procedure, you can create your layouts with MSKLC and deploy them with KbdEdit’s Player version, which costs only 3€. Or maybe you get lucky and the layout installation packages generated by MSKLC just work for you…
Installing MSKLC the standard way gives problems in Windows 10. Follow these steps instead:
0. Don’t run the MSKLC installer yet. First:
1. Install .NET framework:
a) Press “Windows Logo” + “R” keys on the keyboard.
b) Type “appwiz.cpl” in the “Run” command box and press “ENTER”.
c) In the “Programs and Features” window, click on the link “Turn Windows features on or off”.
d) Check if the “.NET Framework 3.5 (includes .NET 2.0 and 3.0)” option is available in it.
e) If yes, then enable it by checking its box (the suboptions aren’t necessary) and then click “OK”.
f) Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the installation and restart the computer, if prompted.
This will install the .NET Framework 3.5 feature on the computer. It takes a few minutes and about 125 MB.
2. Now download the MSKLC 1.4 installer and run it. It should NOT show a message that you need to install .NET.