Ramopakhyana: electronic publishing of a Sanskrit textbook
Our part of the Ramopakhyana project is the creation of a printed counterpart to the on-line text edition: that is, producing from the database files the camera-ready copy for the printed textbook, as specified by the publisher. The data provided by the parent project lead is stored in whitespace-delimited fields in seven text files (one for each data category, such as Sanskrit text, transliteration, or translation) created with the desired roman and Nagari PostScript fonts in Microsoft Word.
A Perl script extracts the appropriate data verse by verse from each file, and writes out a TeX file combining the items in each data category corresponding to each verse, and including the necessary TeX macros to specify the desired layout for each type of data. TeX virtual fonts are invoked to incorporate the desired PostScript fonts into the output. The result is a ready-to-print document of several hundred pages for which many sophisticated typesetting tasks (line breaking, hyphenation, and spacing; page breaking; page headers; double-column format; tables; font changes) are handled automatically according to user-specified parameters, with no markup or editing required on the part of the user.
The Ramopakhyana is one of the texts in "Kramapatha: A foreign language reader for the sequential unfoldment of knowledge." This is an electronic tool for delivering independent-study online editions of Sanskrit texts for self-guided language study. The edition consists of the verses of the Sanskrit text accompanied by detailed study aids for each verse: roman transliteration, word-by-word sandhi analysis and grammatical analysis, Sanskrit prose paraphrase, notes on interpretation, and English prose translation. Each type of study-aid information is dynamically retrieved from the database and presented to the reader on demand; user-specified global parameters can be set to determine automatically how much and what kind of help the reader will be shown. The printed counterpart to the online edition presents all the above information for each verse in a more conventional static textbook format.
| Principal Investigator(s) or Parent Project Lead(s): |
Peter Scharf
Department of Classics, Brown University
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| Research domains: |
humanities computing |
| STG involvement initiated: |
November 1999 |
| Status: | archived |
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Funding support: |
Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning, Brown University |
Record last modified: 13-Sep-2005
