Usage Hints

• As mentioned earlier, the system automatically uses ligatures whenever possible. For example, since the ta-ta ligature exists, input text of the form tti is printed as tti. If instead you need it to be printed as tti you have two choices. One, if you never want the ta-ta ligature to be used, you can edit the IFM file and comment out all the lines that refer to the ta-ta ligature. (The IFM file is a text file, for more information, see the technical documentation in tech.tex.)

  On the other hand, if you do want to keep the ligature, except in a few locations in the input text (say for small point type), or if you do not want to edit the IFM file, you can use the ligature inhibitors {} to prevent a ligature from being used. Whenever the {} characters are inserted between two consonants, itrans refrains from using the ligature (if it exists, if it does not, then these characters have basically no effect). Instead, the half-forms of the consonants (as appropriate) are used. Thus, even if the IFM file contains the ta-ta ligature, the input text t{}ti always appears as tti.

• Use the character pair {} to break the lexical scan. This becomes necessary because of the default behavior of the scanner, which tries to match the largest possible input pattern. Thus, when you write nga in the transliterated text, it comes out as nga in marathi or nga in tamil. Now, that is just what you want for the ng consonant, but what if you wanted it to be scanned as two consonants: n, followed by g ? In such cases, you need to break the lexical scan, by introducing the {} character pair to stop the scanner from associating g with the n preceding it. So, n{}ga in the input text results in: nga for marathi and nga for tamil.

  This is a thing to watch out for in all cases where some consonant has a multiple letter mapping, and each letter by itself also represents some other consonant. In the above example, ng is the two letter consonant map, and both n and g represent other consonants.

• The fonts provided may be missing some or all punctuation characters, some may also be missing numbers. For example, the tamil font used, wntml, does not have any numerals or any punctuation characters. The devanagari font does have numbers and some punctuation marks (the double-quote is missing, for example).

  In all such cases, you can always get the required punctuation or digit character by ending the indian language transliteration scope (using one of the endmarkers), then printing the required punctuation mark, and the restarting the transliteration by using the start marker.

  An easier method, in TEX is to make use of the math mode for numbers. It is usually sufficient to use the $ enclosing scope to make numbers print correctly, since a $ enters mathmode and uses the math fonts. For punctuation marks, the user needs to explicitly change fonts: example:
  \char92marathi......{\rm "}.......\char92endmarathi.

  But that is preferable over this form:
  \char92marathi......\char92endmarathi" \char92marathi.......\char92endmarathi.

• How does itrans handle ligatures with more than two consonants ? For example, shhTmii contains three consonants. This ligature produces shhTmii, the way itrans works is as follows: Beginning with the first consonant in the list, itrans checks if a double-consonant ligature has been defined for that consonant and the next one in the list. If such a character exists, then it is used and both consonants are consumed, and itrans repeats the procedure for the next consonant.

  There is one exception to the above rule: if at all possible, the last two consonants are handled together, that is if a ligature of the last two consonants exists, that is used over the pairing that would result from the above method. Example: shhTrii produces shhTrii, both shha-Ta and Ta-ra ligatures exist, but since the consonants Ta and ra are the last two consonants, that ligature is used over shha-Ta.

  Of course, this default behavior can be changed by appropriately placing the ligature inhibitor sequence, {}. Example: shhTr{}ii produces shhTrii.