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# itrans Mechanism

itrans works by assigning every Indian language letter an english equivalent. Transliteration tables mapping devanagari or tamil or telugu, etc. characters into english equivalents are provided in the reference documents for each language, all of which are described in following sections of this document.

itrans scans the input text for consonants, vowels, and special forms. Consonants suffixed with vowel codes create a complete composite character. A consonant may be suffixed with one or more consonants to create ligature forms. All this transliteration is automatically handled, and appropriate Indian language characters are produced. If ligatures exist for a particular combination of consonants, they will be used automatically. If a ligature does not exist for some combination of the consonants, half-forms of the consonants will be used. The user can also override the ligature mechanism so that even if a ligature exists, the half forms of consonants will be used. Some languages such as tamil do not have any ligatures, in that case the appropriate action is taken -- for tamil, a dot is printed on top of a consonant if it is not followed by a vowel form.

All these features make itrans an highly customizable and easy-to-use package. Even the transliteration map given here is not mandatory--the user can always edit the lexical source file and provide whatever mapping desired.

itrans is just a transliteration/char composition package. The task of actually placing characters on the page and spacing them correctly is left to other programs, such as TEX. TEX is the preferred interface, but, other modes are available for direct Text output (suitable for HTML output or Unicode UTF-8 output). ITRANS version 5.1 added a new output mode - direct text HTML output - which allows ITRANS output in certain scripts to be directly viewed on WWW browsers such as Netscape (version 3.0 or newer). ITRANS version 5.3 added support for Unicode (UTF-8) output. These additional modes are available only for certain languages - not all are supported. Consult the language specific documentation for supported modes for each font.

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