Tags: Quoting Sanskrit and Translations - A brief tag tutorial, a reminder

In our discussions, we find ourselves frequently quoting texts from various sources. To help keep our posts easily digestable, we have tags for easy formating of the text. This is a quick reminder on how to use them.

Quoting Sanskrit

There are two basic genres, verse and prose. Verse is centered, prose is left aligned. Example on verses:


That will produce:


Example on prose:


That will produce:



Quoting Translations

There are two basic varieties of quoted text: Those that follow a Sanskrit passage, and those that are on their own. Generally, the following style is used after a Sanskrit passage, when the translation is not very long:


That would produce:


And, when there's a longer passage of text that doesn't look sensible in the above format, we have the new passage-tag:


That would produce:



You can see all of them in action for example in this post. Please learn to use them to make the post more easily digestable.


Converting the diacritics

And also, remember the Diacritics Convertor available at the right corner of every posting screen, right on the green bar just above the box where you type your posts. It helps you convert diacritics to a more readable format. For example, instead of the following:


You would have the following after converting Balaram to Harvard-Kyoto:


That makes all the difference, doesn't it?

There is also another common encoding we meet, particularly with classical texts such as the Upanishads and Vedanta-bhashyas, called ITRANS. In Harvard-Kyoto we would write kRSNa, in ITRANS we would write kR^iShNa. Both are easily readable, though the trend here has been to use Harvard-Kyoto.

If anyone is using the BBCode extension for Firefox, you can define custom codes to ease use of these tags.

I noticed that, but I find myself typing them in faster than it takes to hover for the menu. Then again I type a good many hours per day and pretty fast (100WPM @ 99% accuracy, now that I looked it up), so the extension might make all the difference for others.

Please note that the tags have been truncated to shorter versions for your convenience. The older versions are no longer supported and will not render the desired effect.

If you want more tags added, please describe them and we'll look into it.

Very nice work.

Can I humbly suggest modifying the 'translation' tags in order to align text in the centre? Because sometimes the translations of the verses I post are too short and look a bit weird when it's left-aligned, and I end up having to manually align the text to the centre and embolden it to look like a "translation".

So is it possible to make sure that anything within 'translation' tags is automatically centred? Or would that be impractical in the bigger picture?

Yes, you can suggest that. But I am not going to do it, because it goes against just about every available typographic convention.

If you need have it centered, you can just stick [ center ] [ /center ] tags inside the [ t ] tags. Now aren't we smiling today.

Well it's nice to see you in a good mood anyhow.

A tag(s) that would produce this would be found useful for the way I like to post certain things.


As far as the colors go I would like a variety pack.

I like to use medium violet red, crimson, indian red, light sea green, and also hot pink depending upon my mood.

Also, when giving credit to the translator or origin of a text, I like to do this so as not to distract too much from the post....



Hmmm....two types of these would be handy, one using the default font, and one using the Times font, in which case you would need to boost the size to level 2 to make it more legible.

I know that this suggestion is very personalized, and thus perhaps not too practical and worth implementing.... Tags like this do offer the benefit of making many posts more visually attractive though, and more easily read...

Yes. That would be very nice, Madhava!

I think most of us would prefer if there were softer colors of red, blue, and some fluorescent colors perhaps.

Sakhicharan -


OK, we'll make that with an option for color, [whathaveyou=color]. Name the tag?


Sure, we can add that in.

Colors: Pick your choice -

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colornames.asp

How about I add them all and we have them available in a popup-window like the Diacritics Convertor is?

Having a drop down list of assorted colors would be nice.
The reason I requested the above tag is because of the inconvenience of adding all these tags due to the fact that the selected text generally will lose focus after you add a tag, then you have to go back and re-highlight the text and so on.
Maybe this would be the best approach...is there a way to keep the selected text from losing focus until you have applied all the desired tags? If so, then that would be great and then all I would ask for is that you create a button to center the text with.
Oh, and is there a problem with the link for the diacritics convertor? I have been finding myself having to go over to KP to use the convertor.