skt

Sanskrit transliteration and collation.

Purpose

This is a set of finite-state machines for sorting and transliterating Sanskrit texts.

Building

A modern C compiler is required, which means either GCC or CLang. Then:

$ make && sudo make install

The above installs two binaries: skt_sort and skt_translit. Internal routines used by these tools are defined in the two source files in this directory. A Lua binding is available in the lua directory.

Usage

Two things to be borne in mind:

• Strings provided as input must be UTF-8 encoded, otherwise the routines won't work correctly. Likewise, they must be normalized to either of NFC and NFKC. Transliteration mappings always generate NFC strings.
• Transliteration is not necessarily a reversible process. For this reason, replacing a string with its transliteration and permanently discarding the original string is not a good idea.

Transliteration example:

$ skt_translit -i velthuis -o iast a.mza
aṃśa

Sorting example:

$ sort -R test/monier.txt | head -5 | skt_sort
āyurdāvan
jaraṇyu
tūṣa
lalitāgadyanirūpaṇa
vināyakasahasranāman