Balaram > H-K Sanskrit Diacritics Convertor - A client-end application

I've been working on a client-end Balaram to H-K convertor. I know it's more efficient as a server-end application, and I do have one coded in PHP for various encodings, but I'd rather not make our server a den of conversions, so I thought a client-end version is needed as well.

http://www.granthamandira.org/convert/

I'll incorporate that to the forums in the next update. I will also include an option to convert H-K to Balaram, as well as to remove diacritics altogether.

If you wish to use the converter offline, you can just save the web-page, and it should work as it does online.

I'm aware it's probably not cross-browser compatible all the way, I am ironing that out. IE 6.0 works fine, Mozilla doesn't. I don't have Netscape or Opera installed at the moment, I'll have to give them a try, too. Let me know if it works for you.

Further discussions and user support in here.

The convertor has now been updated with following conversions:

Balaram > Harvard-Kyoto > Balaram
Balaram > CSX > Balaram
Balaram > ITRANS > Balaram
Balaram > Unicode HTML > Balaram
Balaram > Velthuis > Balaram
Balaram removal

Now it is also cross-browser compatible. It has been tested on Internet Explorer 6.0, Netscape 7.2, Mozilla Firebird 0.7 and Opera 7.23. Please report the performance on other platforms in this thread.

http://www.granthamandira.org/convert/

You'll now find a link to the convertor on the top right of the post screen. It opens a pop-up window where you can do the conversion and post in the text in a readable format.

I just saved the page and tried it offline. It works great. Thanks so much for this.

great!

thank you!

I've now tweaked the code a bit and added Balaram > Velthuis > Balaram to the list of conversions. ITRANS is coming in shortly. That should just about cover all we might need.

I've swapped it over to be a GGM project. Not that it would make any difference to any of you.

Dear Madhava,

I tested your program using both Camino (version 0.7) and Safari (1.1.1 (v100.1)) on my Mac; both worked well.

Thank you so much. This is a wonderful tool.

Sincerely,
Elpis

Great. Thanks, Elpis.

ITRANS support has been added. The convertor handles both the ITRANS standard as well as the exceptions in the encoding of the Sanskrit Document Site, at least as far as I managed to track them down. If I missed any, please let me know.

The PHP-version is now available.

http://sabha.granthamandira.org/index.php?...&f=11&t=62&st=0

Unicode HTML support added to both JavaScript and PHP versions. Next I'll be working on adding Balaram-independent conversions to the utility.

Any feature requests from our users?

Unicode HTML output looks like this:

śrī-rādhā-madana-mohanau vijayetām |
śrī-śrī-kṛṣṇa-caitanya-nityānandau vijayetām ||

Though initially the diacritic characters show up as & #314; etc. (the HTML codes for the characters) they show up as regular diacritics once you post them in. At least the Tahoma font (on Windows) supports all the characters we use for Sanskrit transliteration. Verdana has most of them, while Times New Roman and Arial have some. Generally the lacking characters are substituted by the available Unicode font having the required characters. Fortunately Tahoma and Verdana are very much akin, so you hardly notice the substituted characters above.

Here's how it'd look like in Times New Roman:

śrī-rādhā-madana-mohanau vijayetām |
śrī-śrī-kṛṣṇa-caitanya-nityānandau vijayetām ||

As you see, S and N are missing there.

Unicode is still not a widely established standard, but hopefully it'll become more widely implemented in a variety of fonts in the future. If you know of other good Unicode fonts supporting all the IAST characters, please let us know.

I've now removed a redundant loop which bogged down the JavaScript version with bigger conversions and replaced it with a global replace request. Translation: The script is much faster now. Crunches 70 pages in two seconds.

CSX support added. Capital L cedilla using the infinity symbol is a bit of an issue, I can't seem to input it into plain text files. Any tips?

The latest news on the convertor:

http://www.granthamandira.org/convertor.php

There's also a separte category in the GGM forums for questions and answers related with the utility.

Is it me or does it not work right now?

And what seems to be the problem?

It just didn't work. I pasted in some Balaram text to get to convert to HK. I clicked and clicked and nothing happened. I thought my IE is messed up but the same thing happened in Netscape. Just doesn't work for me right now. I tried to convert to the other types as well but nothing happened.

I have had the similar problem here, but I don't think, that yours can be solved as easily, as mine, since you live in UK and are probably using English software...

Anyway, I put a solution here for all, who have localised versions of OS and browsers. When you open Conventor, go to "View-->Encoding" menu of your browser, and change encoding from your local setting ("Cyrillic (Windows)" in my case) to "Western European (ISO)" or "Western European (Windows)" before putting any text for conversion - script will now work properly...

My browser was already set at Western European ISO, so that is not the problem. I finally figured out what it was though. I was trying to copy and paste a verse from the Vedabase.Net site into the converter. For some reason the converter does not work for this site.
I tested it just now with a quote from one of my MSWord Balaram'ed documents and it works fine.