UAST: Unicode Aware Sanskrit Transliteration

TL;DR

This paper introduces UAST, a Unicode-aware transliteration scheme for Sanskrit that addresses encoding incompatibilities between Devanagari, IAST, and Unicode, facilitating better typesetting and script support.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel Unicode-aware transliteration scheme for Sanskrit that resolves encoding issues and supports multiple scripts, with open-source implementations provided.

Findings

Addresses fundamental Unicode encoding issues for Sanskrit transliteration

Provides open-source tools for multiple scripts

Improves compatibility between transliteration schemes and Unicode

Abstract

Devan\=agar\=i is the writing system that is adapted by various languages like Sanskrit. International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a transliteration scheme for romanisation of Sanskrit language. IAST makes use of diacritics to represent various characters. On a computer, these are represented using Unicode standard which differs from how the Sanskrit language behaves at a very fundamental level. This results in an issue that is encountered while designing typesetting software for devan\=agar\=i and IAST. We hereby discuss the problems and provide a solution that solves the issue of incompatibilities between various transliteration and encoding schemes. The base implementation that should be used is available at https://github.com/dhruvildave/uast.rs. Another implementation that extends UAST to around $10$ scripts is available at https://github.com/aneri0x4f/uast-cli and https://github.com/dhruvildave/uast .