A Case for T E X in India — the Indian T E X Users Group a General Overview of T E X Users in India

Unlike in other countries, TEX migrated to India as a medium of typesetting for the Western publishing world. With its vast human potential and the cheap­ ness of its cost, India enticed the publishing giants like Elsevier, Academic Press, Springer-Verlag, etc., for their pre-press work and with that the TEX lan­ guage found its way into this subcontinent. Its mea­ ger presence in the very many higher academic in­ stitutions and its pronounced absence from ordinary institutions strengthens the paradigm that TEX us­ age in India is primarily a gut-oriented phenomenon rather than an author driven one. This is further demonstrated by the clear absence of TEX-related research, newer macro development, font generation for the multitude of Indian scripts, etc. The Indian academy, in contrast to its Western counterparts, pays scant regard for such things or seldom con­ siders it as a necessity. Therefore, the problems of TEX usage in India are diametrically different from those in other parts of the world. It is not strange that the recently formed Indian TEX Users Group faces the constraints of lack of research and economic issues of the users as well (quite strange!) since the vast majority of its members are from the typesetting industry who chose TEX language as a means of their livelihood. These and related issues are described in this article. A general overview of TEX users in India There can be a vertical split when we consider the general users of the TEX language in India, one from the typesetting industry and the other from the higher institutions of learning. The former category may outnumber the latter. Except for the Indian Institutes of Technology (a chain of institutes spread all over India, noted for its academic excellence and standards) and certain specific scientific institutions like the Indian Institute of Science, Inter University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Tata In­ stitute of Fundamental Research, etc., TEX is still alien to the academy or the researchers. The ad­ vent of WYSIWYG typesetting software has further pushed back the chances of TEX usage. Yet another paradoxical element you can observe here is that the Indian academy considers typesetting issues as the burden of publishing houses, and it is not the concern of the author to address the enigma of his own document presentation. This is the general philosophy of even the computer scientists working in various Universities in India. The limits of our document preparation skills are dictated by few Microsoft products. If any of the Microsoft product is incapable of presenting our document, we would resort to manual operations, thereby making it a childish doodle, for the present-day Indian mind is not at all carried away by refined and sophisticated presentation, in sharp contrast to the classic Indian aesthetic sensibilities. This being the general attitude of the aca­ demics around this country, the quantum and the quality of TEX usage in the academy can be gauged by anybody. This may be the prime reason why India lagged behind in forming its user group when everyone else in the educated West went ahead with their user groups and made substantive contribu­ tions to the TEX language. India became a silent spectator, with a subdued longing for enjoying the fruits of TEX research in the West with an apparent resignation that is typical of a Hindu mind. The shape of things in the Indian typesetting industry is also not so bright. Due to lack of any mean­ ingful research and development team, they solely depend on or unabashedly hire Western intelligence for the development of their in-house arsenal. Even in matters as simple as writing a filter for SGML to TEX or vice versa , they do get filters written by external agencies, present these to their clients as if developed by their own R&D team, and win huge contracts. In short, healthy usage of the TEX language is still a distant dream in any of these agencies. Early work on Indian languages One of the earlier work on TEX language that con­ cerns Indian scripts are done by Avinash Chopde;1 the package, called ITRANS , bundles lot of Indian scripts with LATEX. You create an .itx file and run it through ITRANS to convert it to a .tex file. The commands are the same for Tamil, Sanskrit, Marathi, etc. His home page describes the system fully; it is available for Unix and PC platforms. There is also JTRANS (Sandeep Sibal), a Java program that enables you to see Sanskrit text in an HTML document. There is also an Xdvng font that if installed will display Sanskrit documents on the Web. All these are explained in detail in the file index.html available via anonymous ftp from jaguar.cs.utah.edu in the directory private/sanskrit. You will have fun with all these programs and Avinash can throw more light on all 1 http://www.paranoia.com/~avinash/itrans.html TUGboat , Volume 19 (1998), No. 1 7 these topics, since he created the various ITRANS versions. He has also an ITRANS songbook that lists several thousand Hindi film songs in Devana­ gari script. If you visit http://www.concentric.com/ ~Dchand/jaguar , click on Processing Tools, where several packages for processing Sanskrit on the net are described with pointers to ITRANS , JTRANS , and others. Currently ITRANS supports Devana­ gari (Sanskrit/Hindi/Marathi), Tamil, Telugu, Kan­ nada, Bengali, Gujarati, and Romanized Sanskrit script output. The input text to ITRANS is in a transliterated form. Each letter in an Indian Script is assigned an English equivalent, and the English letters are used to construct what will eventually print out in the Indian Language Script. ITRANS offers a choice of two input encodings: ITRANS , and CS/CSX. ITRANS encoding is a 7-bit ASCII encoding, while the CS/CSX encoding is an 8-bit encoding. The ITRANS encoding requires multi-character English code be used to represent each Indic Script letter, while the CS/CSX encoding uses a one-character code to represent each Indic script letter. Other meaningful work undertaken in TEX-related areas includes various fonts created using Metafont or tools like that. Some of the work has been undertaken by non-Indians too. 1. ItxGuj, a Gujarati font, and ItxBeng, a Ben­ gali font, were added to ITRANS. These fonts have been donated to ITRANS by Shrikrishna Patil, and are available in PostScript Type 1 and TrueType formats, so they can be used for printing as well as for display on WWW browsers such as Netscape 3.0 (or later). 2. Though a lot of improvisation is needed, Kan­ nadaTEX (developed by the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Maysore) is a commendable work in the right direction. For the Kannada font from the KannadaTEX package, ITRANS support was added by Raghunath K. Rao. This is a font in Metafont format, so it can be used only with TEX. 3. Devanagari font: Xdvng , by Sandeep Sibal is available in PostScript Type 1 and TrueType formats, so it can be used for printing as well as for display on WWW HTML browsers such as Netscape 3.0 (or later). The Xdvng font is a derivative of the Devnag font developed by Frans Velthuis. 4. Romanized Devanagari fonts: CSUtopia , by Dominik Wujastyk,2 and Washington Indic Ro­ man by Thomas Ridgeway; both in Classical Sanskrit Roman encoding (CS/CSX encoding). 5. Malayalam font: by Jeroen Hellingman,3 a commendable work for both the traditional and reformed scripts. This is complete ex­ cept for Metafont sources; instead a range of pre-compiled sizes is included for the main font, and is available at CTAN. This system comes with two pre-processors, patc and mm. The malyalam.sty4 package is an interface to malayalamTEX, for use with LATEX2ε. It works by loading Hellingman’s macro files mmmacs.tex and mmtrmacs.tex to interpret the TEX macros generated by the patc and mm pre-processors. Note that these macro files are not provided as part of malyalam.sty , but must be collected separately from CTAN or elsewhere. Problems of TEX in India As you can see, except for baseline research on some font generation, nothing substantive is forth­ coming from the Indian TEX world. TEX has never percolated into the local publishing industry. As such, document preparation (especially technical documents) in the regional languages suffers consid­ erably and its current status is deplorably poor. It has an indirect effect on the development of scientific document presentation in local languages. People quite simply are forced to believe that our languages are not fit for scientific document presentation and console themselves that it is a cherished domain of European languages. For instance, the State Languages Institute of Kerala (Kerala is one of the Indian States where the literacy rate has sur­ passed 95%), the official body for the production of school and University text books in Malayalam (the language of Kerala), finds it difficult to produce advanced scientific books with a quality comparable to English language text books, though intellectual resources are abundant. Secondly, with a very healthy and vibrant lit­ erature, the Indian regional languages publishing is one of the richest industries in the country. But electronic digitizing and archiving of the multitude of books released in a variety of languages (both of­ ficially recognized and otherwise) is a distant dream for us. No effort has been invested to address the 2 [email protected] 3 [email protected] 4 http://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/language/