Babel Speaks Hindi

Abstract

Babel provides a unified interface for creation of multilingual documents. Unfortunatelyno Indic languages are currently supported, so typesetting in Indiclanguages is based on specialised packages. The most advanced of theseis Velthuis Devan¯agar¯ı for TEX, because it already provides Hindi values forlanguage-dependent strings as well as a macro for a European-style date. Alanguage definition file for plugging Hindi into Babel has therefore been recentlydeveloped.The second part of the paper explains differences between Unicode andVelthuis transliteration. This is important for understanding the tool that canconvert Hindi and Sanskrit documents from MS Word and OpenOffice.org intoTEX via an XSLT 2.0 processor and a Perl script, as well as a method of makingthe PDF files searchable.Finally the paper discusses some possibilities of further development: theadvantages offered by X ETEX and the forthcoming integration of Lua into pdfTEX.