Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Sanskrit hyphenation list

I'm gradually building up a file of hyphenated Sanskrit words and compounds, written in the Latin alphabet.  The file is called sanskrit-hyphenations.tex, and you are welcome to download it.

It contains hyphenation points for words in English (ayur-veda), and for words in Sanskrit (āyur-veda).
 To use it, do something like this in your style file:
\setotherlanguage{sanskrit}
\newfontfamily\sanskritfont{Sanskrit 2003}
% Define \sansk{} which is the same as \emph{}, except
% that it causes appropriate hyphenation

% for Sanskrit words.  Use \sansk{} for Sanskrit and
% \emph{} for English.

\newcommand{\sansk}[1]{\emph{\textsanskrit{#1}}}
 and \input the sanskrit-hyphenations.tex file after \begin{document}, thus:
\begin{document}
  \input{sanskrit-hyphenations.tex}

...
\end{document}

XeTeX  already has built-in hyphenation rules for Devanāgarī and Romanized Sanskrit. The above file is intended to extend the hyphenation coverage for Romanized words, using etymological and stylistic considerations.