[Buddha-l] Tibetan Input (was: OOo)

[Richard Hayes]

On Wednesday 02 May 2007 01:26, Margaret Gouin wrote:

> Chris, thanks for your very complete reply. Gives me the complete toolkit
> to get started!

I'd like to join Margaret in thanking Chris for his very helpful message on 
tools for working with non-Europeans languages with Open Office, either on a 
Windows or a Linux platform. At the risk of complicating the picture a bit, 
I'd like to complicate the picture a bit.

Over the years I have found the most powerful tool for producing attractive 
printed text and PDF files (albeit at the expense of having to do some 
learning and some work) is the markup language called LaTeX. Originally 
designed for typesetting mathematics, LaTeX is now used widely by people who 
need to produce multilingual texts using Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, Korean, 
Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Cherokee, Inuktitut or even exotic scripts such as 
Klingon and the various Tolkien languages. 

LaTeX , like HTML and XML, is a markup language that can be produced using any 
editor on any platform (Windows, Apple, UNIX, Linux etc). I personally have 
grown accustomed to doing almost all my editing using emacs (an open-source 
program that has been ported to all platforms). Emacs has long been a 
favorite tool of programmers (which I am not), because it is itself a highly 
programmable editor. During the past twenty years or so people have designed 
packages that make working on HTML, CSS, LaTeX and XML codes painless and 
almost a little fun. Emacs has scores (perhaps hundreds) of easy-to-use input 
methods for typing Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Bengali, Sanskrit 
(either devanagari or transliteration), Vietnamese and (of course) all the 
European languages with their abundance of accents, diacritics and 
punctuation marks. Emacs is an ideal tool to use to produce Unicode text with 
embedded markup macros (such as LaTeX, HTML or XML). What I like best about 
emacs (and LaTeX) is that it is (they are) so stable. Improvements are made 
all the time, but all versions are downward compatible, so once you learn it, 
you never have to worry about it becoming obsolete. I also like it because, 
like all open source software, it is absolutely free.

Dominik Wujastyk and others have produced a very powerful set of LaTeX macros 
called LEDMAC for producing critical editions. LEDMAC is helpful in case one 
needs to produce any critical edition with numbered lines, several sets of 
footnotes, and several sets of endnotes. Like everything in the LaTeX world, 
LEDMAC can be tailored to produce just the kind of format one needs. If 
anyone is interested in seeing some editions I cranked out for my Sanskrit 
students, they can be seen by going to my download page 
(http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes/download.html ). That download page and 
everything available on it was all produced on emacs, often in conjunction 
with LaTeX. 

Another valuable tool for scholars is a family of LaTeX macros for managing 
citations and bibliographies and maintaining a bibliographical database. This 
tool is called bibTeX. So if your critical edition requires a bibliography, 
you can use bibTeX along with LEDMAC.

If any of you are planning to publish an article in Indian Journal of 
Philosophy, be aware than JIP has a special set of LaTeX macros available for 
producing endnotes and bibliographical references just as they want them, and 
JIP will happily accept a LaTeX file as your eloctronic submission.

LaTeX has macros for handling graphics and colors and just about any font 
under the sun, and nowadays it is very easy to produce PDF output from a 
LaTeX document. There are also converters that turn LaTeX documents into 
pretty good HTML (although like all HTML generated automatically or through 
transformation it is unnecessarily bulky.)

There is a Russian proverb that goes "The wise person says, 'I am looking for 
the truth,' and the fool, "I have found the truth." That proverb may be true 
of truth. I am not sure if it is equally applicable for seekers and finders 
of really good software. If is is, then I am a fool, for I have stopped 
looking, having found stable tools that work beautifully for the kind of work 
I do.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should divulge that I have no connection 
at all with any of the products mentioned above. I just use them and 
recommend them to people involved in Buddhist studies.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes