Indian scripts in a nutshell

Indian writing is said to have started with the Braahmii script, which
was used for writing the early dialects of Prakrit. Today, Braahmii
script survives in rock inscriptions, the best known of which are the
edicts of Ashoka, dating to the 3rd century BCE or roughly a hundred
years after the Buddha. Contemporary with Braahmii is another script
known as the Kharo.s.thii (or Gaandhaarii) script. Unlike Braahmii,
Kharo.s.thii was only used in Afghanistan and northwestern India.

[From this point onwards, Braahmii will be written as Brahmi, and
Kharo.s.thii as Kharosthi.]

Today, scholars are still trying to determine the origin of the Brahmi
script. Some of them believe that Brahmi was native to India, and
probably derived from the Indus (Harappan) script. However, the
majority of the scholars claim a Semitic origin for Brahmi. Both
theories still require more research to be of greater significance.

Over time, the Kharosthi script fell out of use but Brahmi continued
to develop into several descendant scripts. Among them is the
Devanaagarii (hereafter Devanagari) script, which is used for writing
Sanskrit (from the 19th century), Hindi and Marathi up to the present day.

Roman transliteration schemes

In September 1894, European scholars of Sanskrit set up a
Transliteration Committee at the Geneva Oriental Congress. The
committee made a set of recommendations for representing the
Devanagari script using Roman characters. These recommendations have
been broadly adhered to until now.

Today, several schemes exist for transliterating Indic scripts. The
more popular transliteration schemes for romanisation of Sanskrit and
Pali are the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration
(IAST), the Harvard-Kyoto Convention, ITRANS and Velthuis.

The problem with IAST and similar schemes is the use of diacritics,
which are not available on the plain ASCII keyboard and also not
displayable on older computer systems. The problem with Harvard-Kyoto
and ITRANS is the use of capital letters that can be difficult to read
in the middle of words.

Both of these problems were overcome by the Velthuis encoding scheme.
The Velthuis scheme has been used widely to type Sanskrit texts. It
was developed as a means of providing transliterated input for the
"Devanagari for TeX" (devnag) package. The devnag package was
originally developed in May 1991 by Frans Velthuis for the University
of Groningen in the Netherlands.

The Velthuis scheme follows two basic rules: double the vowels,
punctuate the consonants.

* Long vowels are doubled.
* For consonants, the diacritic mark precedes the letter it affects.

Unicode and Velthuis encoding

Microsoft first adopted native Unicode support in Windows NT, and
subsequently Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Apple introduced limited
Unicode support to the Macintosh with Mac OS 8.5, while full Unicode
support arrived with Mac OS X. Before Unicode, there are fonts which
can display Sanskrit/Pali characters with diacritics. However, these
fonts are not compatible with each other, i.e. changing the font type
in a document will completely distort the diacritical characters. With
Unicode fonts, this problem has become history.

The following page contains tables showing both Unicode and Velthuis
encoding. It also lists references to this essay. Future corrections
and updates to the essay will also be made on this page.

http://www.tipitaka.net/forge/index.php?article=velthuis