Template talk:IAST

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[edit] See also

[edit] Italics

Can we get rid of the italics on the text? The use of italics on pretty much 90% of systems with some of the IAST characters (e.g. ṁ) results in wierd spacing because those letters are often substituted with other character (because mainstream fonts don't have all the IAST characters). Sukh | ਸੁਖ | Talk 14:33, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Do we need this?

Template:Unicode works just as well. --Babub→Talk 10:19, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, the IAST template is needed because the purpose is to specify which of several different transliteration methods is being used for the Devanagari writing system, not to specific a computer format. That is, it says that the romanization has been performed using the IAST system of romanized glyphs, and not one of the other romanization systems which would produce a different string value.
There are several different methods for romanizing the Devanagari writing system. See: Devanagari transliteration. IAST is the academic standard for transliteration. Use of the IAST tag defines which of the transliteration methods is being used. For example, the word for "self" in Devanagai is आत्मन् which is transliterated into English using IAST as ātman (with a diacritical character ā to indicate the long आ). The Harvard-Kyoto method of transliteration would write "Atman" (with a capital A to indicate the long आ). The ITRANS method of transliteration would write either "Atman" (with a capital A) or "aatman" (with two lower-case a characters). By using the IAST tag the reader can determine which of these variant romanizations is being used.
Implementations of the IAST glyphs exist in both Unicode and ASCII forms. So the Unicode tag is not interchangeable with the IAST tag.

Here I will crosspost something from Unicode template talk page regarding the same confusion there:

Using the Unicode template to display Devanagari is no longer as much of an issue as it once was due to better support for Unicode on all new computers that have been sold for at least the past two years. On a practical basis the Unicode template is rarely used on the Hinduism pages that use Devanagari. The IAST transliteration method can optionally be shown via the IAST template if IAST is used. But IAST and Unicode address completely different issues.

The IAST template and the Unicode template do different things. IAST is one of several incompatible transliteration methods for Devanagari. So using the IAST tag specifies which of the alternative methods is being used. Also note that IAST is a transliteration method for a writing system (Devanagari) which is used for multiple languages such as Hindi, Sanskrit, etc. Sanskrit is a language that can be written using various writing systems, such as Bonji, IAST, Devanagari, etc.

The template I see most often on the Hinduism pages for Sanskrit is some variant of this: ([[Sanskrit]]:{{lang|sa|गणेश पुराणम्}}; {{IAST|gaṇeśa purāṇam}}) which displays:

(Sanskrit:गणेश पुराणम्; gaṇeśa purāṇam)

Notice that no explicit Unicode tags are used. The LANG tag argument is just the raw Unicode character value.

Buddhipriya 19:56, 25 March 2007 (UTC)