THIS SITE

Macintosh
Electronic Texts & Citation Rules
Bibliographic Resources
IBM
Fonts, HTML & Codes
Apple's Indian Languages Kit (ILK)

This is technical information for both using hyptertext for language and text study, and putting it on the web. You may also review a general theory overview prepared for a non-specialist grant committee. The best learning comes by experiment, and asking around- try me:atman@vedavid.org
In general, it is easy enough to represent languages using non-Roman characters in a word processor. Plenty of fonts exist for most computers which include actual scripts of nearly every studied language. The trick is to use them on the internet which, largely, is devoted to standard Roman alphabet characters. Special web-browsers can be found, e-mail packages, and so forth. As yet, there is no standard for multiple scripts on the net. Accordingly, HTML can only be used on one-s own system, or done in a roundabout way for the net. Fortunately, this is due to change soon, at least for Mac users.

Electronic Texts & Citation Rules

As you might expect, the protocol folks haven't left cyberia un-fenced with CITATION PROTOCOL. Soon this site will be in order in this respect, but find out how much there is in "e-protocol" with the following links:

For Gopher fans, try this abbreviated version.
Bibliographic References for Computer Files in the Social Sciences: A Discussion Paper
MLA-style Citations of Internet Sources
For a thorough overview, and links to (yikes!) ten possible citation schemes, try Dr. Anita Greenhill's (Griffith University, Australia) site.
If that's not enough, Dr. Greenhill's site is part of the Information Quality WWW Virtual Library
Also a new site from Classroom.net
More detail re. the MLA and so forth can be gotten from either of the following:

MLA/E-text #1
MLA/E-text #2

Electronic Texts

Van Nooten/Holland's RigVeda: A Metrically Restored Text is a prime example of the quality and power of a well-crafted e-text. Converting it can be tricky, so I've included notes on this as well. I highly recommend this edition for any serious e-scholarship.

Truly a resource site among sites, for EVERYTHING Asian, South Asian, East Asian, and Southeast Asian, try Bob Hueckstedt's page at U. of Manitoba. This is a Must Bookmark.

One the largest collections of e-texts is the Jaguar site. They use a phonetic kind of transcription (ITRANS) of South Asian texts which uses capitalization for long vowels and similar conventions. These texts can be converted for Ghostscript and then inserted as a graphic into a text. If you do this though, hypertext linking is another matter. So, for easy study usage--word search, quick scanning and reading (text-only files are quicker than picture/images), these "ITRANS" versions are very handy, and work on IBM or MAC. The converted image/Postscript file can later be used for research extracts as a graphic, or using a screen-saver like PICTify.

The concepts and issues, as well as tools and solutions, for using Sanskrit epic texts in e-form are well-addressed by John Smith of Cambridge.

TEXTS OF ALL DISCIPLINES can be found--with a surprisingly limited number of exceptions--via the Oxford Text Archive. They will also assist in searches.

One of the new developments in Indological resources is the Dharam Hinduja Indic Research Center at Columbia University. This is a consortium of scholars working on various Indic subjects--both textual and interpretive beginning with the Rig Veda and continuing through modern times.

Indology has a great selection of texts as well as the source page for all other text databases extraordinaire, including the e-Rig Veda useful for text-only word-searching (easiest to load, use, post, for any platform) in this site.

Often a trick to actually access, but a source of many resources and probably the most thoroughly comprehensive longterm e-text endeavor, is the Frankfurt TITUS project.

Another collection of Indological texts is available from Bombay.

General resources for a variety of languages can be found in the pioneer site from the University in Eugene, Oregon's "Yamada Language Center."

In addition, there are many online library resources from the CIC of the The Big Ten Universities. Journals and a demo of the Virtual Electronic Library are worth seeing and offer great general-interest academic cut-n-pastes & links.

Home Navigate the Site Mail: atman@vedavid.org

Bibliographic Resources

Professor Michael Witzel of Harvard's homepage contains links to various Bibliographic sources, including previews of upcoming Harvard Oriental Series Publications, and an online shareware edition of Aufrecht's RV, c/o Van Nooten & Holland.

Truly a resource site among sites, for EVERYTHING Asian, South Asian, East Asian, and Southeast Asian, try Bob Hueckstedt's page at U. of Manitoba. This is a Must Bookmark.

Looking for like-minded researchers, publishers, grant team-mates?

Home Navigate the Site Mail: atman@vedavid.org

Fonts, HTML & Coding Issues

There are plenty of fonts, now, for other tongues, but putting them on the net means they must be as graphics, or the reader must have special software (cf. below). Apple is changing this, as is Microsoft.

FOR STARTERS ON FONTS

I tip hat to Dr. Madhav Deshpande for ManjushreeCSX. It affords accents on transliterated Sanskrit with diacritics, looks good on the Net, and is compatible with many software products as a CSX font.

A valuable article on IBM font products, with mixed reviews, is available in this Spring's Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies a useful academic resource in its own right.

There's a good variety, quite attractive and affordable, from Inpros, dealing with many languages.

Your one-stop Indology shop for texts, the first online manuscript (YogaSutras- click on Indology, once there, go to "Digital art . . ."), and all kinds of software is Dominik Wujastyk's Indology site.

Lots of folks tout them, and I've heard nothing bad about them, just haven't tried them yet. The Liberation Fonts people have, indeed, liberated many from the shackles of ASCII.

HTML, WEB-BUILDING HELP/GEAR, OTHER SCRIPTONEERS

In the same vein as my Aufrecht pages check out the wonders of the Quran.

Once the texts are typed in, format them for the future, with the National Endowment for the Humanities, et al's standards for the Text Encoding Initiative.

Remember, HTML is a subset of the broader standard, SGML- Standard General Mark-up Language. Whether on a web, cd, or FTP, this is the rule set for assured value and compatibility of your work.

HTML has a new version, 3.0, which supports the nifty doo-dads like sub-frames in windows, animation, and other whips and whistles.

Something a little more introductory is what you need? Try this primer on HTML.

JUST SAMPLE the wealth of frontier folks. There are some exciting things happening and I encourage you to read this great foreign languages survey sampler link.

Apple's Indian Languages Kit

Look here in the future for reports on the results of the seed development tests approved for Vedavid by Apple of its pre-alpha version of this system-level software. If you have access to a Mac, and are interested in full Devanagari (the kit also has Hindi, Pali, Gujarati, and several other scripts), as text--not graphics--with HTML links, write me as future upgrades will allow you to access the entire database of Indological texts, online, with proper font and--with any luck in the innovation category--accent. Contact me if you are interested as arrangements can be made with Apple:atman@vedavid.org

Home Navigate the Site Mail: atman@vedavid.org

IBM

At this point, for HTML I strongly suggest one of two packages. For fonts, see above.

Snagging on-screen images--NOT THE WHOLE SCREEN!--for Windows 3.1 and alternative Windows 95, FREE.

FOR MULTI-LINGUAL WEB PUBLISHING
The first is currently available free in a test version: Accentsoft has "Internet Accent." Reputedly, it is a full publishing, viewing, etc. page supporting 30 languages and many diacritic characters. User has to have MosaicAccent (also free) to view the finished pages. Check it out--I don't have SoftWindows yet for my Mac, so I haven't played with this IBM new-comer.

The great innovators of the Net, Netscape, have generously--as usual--made their latest version available free to academics and developers. For this and a wealth of other goodies, try this link.

FOR LEARNING CONCEPTS AND POSSIBILITIES
This is how I began. WordPerfect 6.0 (Windows and DOS) and up have a handy little HTML toolkit for the basics within a WP environment under the "Tools" menu. One makes bookmark, and then instructs WP to hyper-link it. It's all point and click and it works with the fonts you already use. It's easy too. GREAT THING is, you can use a proper-looking accented text, which can be cut-n-pasted into research work. Of course, it will only work well in THAT processor's environment. For instance, I converted Van Nooten/Holland's RV to Mac format on WP 3.5, using Deshpande's ManjushreeCSX font (the best for web-viewing). When transported to MS Word 5.1 (my professor's, no less), the keyboard map of Manjushree was not compatible, so multiple characters were simply "dropped." IBM's are just as idiomatic as Mac's on these sorts of compatibility issues.

An impressive site for electronic text resouces--an essential component--and for fonts is the TITUS PROJECT at Frankfurt. At this link they offer "a tool for providing transcriptional fonts via the WWW only. Perhaps you can make use of it."

Home Navigate the Site Mail: atman@vedavid.org

MacIntosh

The full story of this site is below--the related tools and notes of components are listed here:

To get images onscreen, nothing is better than the TOTALLY FREE PICTify. How to install and use it is EASY--click here. To download, click here, or here.

Need to fuss with IMAGE FORMAT, effects, or other tedium?

WEBSITE CONSTRUCTION

The great innovators of the Net, Netscape, have generously--as usual--made their latest version available free to academics and developers. For this and a wealth of other goodies, try this link.

For ease of use, it's hard to beat the engine of this site- PageMill & SiteMill by Adobe. PageMill is very poor on RAM management--loaded pages still clog memory even after closing, large ones mean you might as well re-boot before quittiing PageMill (the only other way to reset RAM) and waiting--again--for memory clearing. Also, for a large site, SiteMill is a better investment--an UTTER joy by comparison, though PageMill 2.0 is due soon. Both are easy drop-n-drag builders, but SiteMill organizes the EASY headache of broken or changed links.

NISUSWRITER's recent release has a powerful HTML editor, with a nice primer for HTML coding language. It also supports and is dedicated for a wide variety of Academic-oriented languages and text-processing tools. Same problem for the net though- no non-ASCII basic characters for HTML uploadiing. It does support a world of fonts, but colleagues in Chinese/Japanese/Korean report spacing problems.

An impressive site for electronic text resouces--an essential component--and for fonts is the TITUS PROJECT at Frankfurt. At this link they offer "a tool for providing transcriptional fonts via the WWW only. Perhaps you can make use of it."

Home Navigate the Site Mail: atman@vedavid.org

Saga of this Site

Thanks to some valuable support (my brother-in-law for tracking down SiteMill, my Mother and Father for various support, my friends, University of Iowa Research Grant, Donations from Interzone, Inc., generous permissions from Barend Van Nooten, Gary Holland, Madhav Deshpande, and the Harvard Oriental Series, the patient tolerance of my Advisor, Fred Smith, on this otherwise unprecedented dissertation path), I got a good leg-up on this project. Some scrounging on the net and on shareware CD's (usually available at university libraries and computing centers), some sweat, and coffee-numb persistence made this possible. I used a lot of shareware, and you can find it easy enough with a simple wordsearch, using the names below, those which are highlighted take you to a search engine.

See the section above on Electronic Texts those are the canvass or raw materials. I used a simple e-Rig Veda (want one free? click here [go to online archive of e-texts once you do] to get the one I edited/used-- soon we'll have accent and diacritics, but then compatibility issues will become more complex--this one is fine for IBM or Mac, and check your browser's "preferences" to see where it puts it when you download) to read line-by-line in PageMill (before I got SiteMill), linking each word as I found it with page anchors. This means drag-n-drop creation of anchors, making note of them, and then linking the previous occasion of the given word to the newly found one (using those notes you carefully take--never think the #1 word-processor of all formats and ages should or can be replaced).

Each hymn with a key word was then "photographed" from Van Nooten/Holland's e-Rig Veda, transliterated with accent, Aufrecht version. I used a TOTALLY free (not even a request for registration) shareware gem called PICTify. It resides in RAM on boot-up and enables sizing, specific naming, and placements of screen-captured images in two formats. Anything you get on your screen, you can put on the web as an image with this and Page/SiteMill. NETSCAPE FREEZE-UPS GOT YOU DOWN? Click on PICTify and get "Defrost" from the same place.

The screen-captured images then were converted into GIF HTML pages (one-by-one: I deeply urge the Standards folks to come up with a solution to the "non-roman-script-&-HTML-on-the-Web" issue!) so the accents and diacritics could be viewed. Ultimately, folks are working on this--well, at least on coding issues like ASCII, ISO 8859, and other things--check them out. Other coding/HTML strugglers are listed above.

If size and file type is an issue, I strongly recommend another vital tool, also shareware, called GraphicConverter. You name a format, it'll read and convert it. It also does nice size, color, hue, contrast, and even dithering and enhancements.

I also used the university's Information Arcade to scan in images. If their size wasn't right, I'd use GraphicConverter then PICTify to save--right off the GraphicConverter screen, the image once it was right--even a good file converter can't be flawless. Besides, the PICTify route trims unneeded memory bloating from an image. Page/SiteMill will then make a tidy GIF when you call it up into a page.

For non-standard fonts, I selected, manipulated (color, etc.), and arranged them with borders and such right in my wordprocessor (Novell's Wordperfect 3.5- AWESOME, simple, fast--makes MS Word 6.0 look like the memory-hungry kluge it is--and, it doesn't even have HTML for all that bulk--or fun things like voice-reading). Then good old PICTify made them ready for Page/SiteMill.

Critical crisis--you can do linkages with graphic images of text (soon I'll have the Nirukta linked to its RV citations in this way), but it must be image-mapped. PageSiteMill enables you to take an image (like the map page--here's what the "map" of the map looks like), create regions in it- then link those regions to almost anything.

***WARNING***

DO NOT even begin doing this until you properly configure your image-mapping for your server. The web builder must set text for an IBM, Mac, or UNIX server, the location of the scripting instructions, and so forth. You must work this out with your server first--sadly, every server is different on this. Otherwise, you get all your painstaking work done, upload it, and get all these damn "Server Error" or "File not Found" faux pas in your site.

And, of course, I offer you my own best resource--my persistence and enjoyment of problem-solving--for your free use:atman@vedavid.org

Home Navigate the Site Mail: atman@vedavid.org