Sanskrit diacritics in cyrillic fonts

[Santos_D]

Dear everyone,

For some time already I am struggling, with a task of which I can’t seem to find a proper solution for Linux or Android.

My aim is to add sanskrit diacritics to a cyrillic font (which one I don’t care) of a transliteration for cyrillic reader.
I just found out about Keyman, and would like to ask, if there would be a solution to my struggles using your this software.

So in short, do I have a chance to solve that using Keyman?

[Steve_White]

If the sanskrit diacritics are defined in the Unicode standard, you should be able to set up a Keyman keyboard that enters the diacritics along with Cyrillic characters. But you would need to find a font that includes both the cyrillic characters and the sanskrit diacritics.

[Lorna]

Welcome Santos. SIL’s Charis SIL, Doulos SIL, Gentium Plus, and Andika fonts all have the combining marks from the U+0300 range, and have most Cyrillic letters (except a few archaic characters), so using any of those fonts should work for you. You would need to create a keyboard and distribute a font with the keyboard and there’s a good chance it would work on Linux, and a smallish chance it will work on Android (you can only use a specific font within the Keyman app on Android).

[Santos_D]

Thank you for your suggestions.

I’d like to give it a try. I am using a Fedora Core system, yet I see the Keyman repo is an .deb based: Download Keyman for Linux

Is there an alternative link perhaps for .rpm packages?

[Marc]

We don’t yet have .rpm packages (issue #3253). Hoping for a community contribution because we don’t currently have the resources to create them!

You can build Keyman on your machine from source, but I appreciate that is not always straightforward.

[Andrew_Cunningham]

There are two key issues:

1. locating and installing a font that has required Cyrillic support, Lorna has suggested some fonts, there will be others available as well.

2. a method for generating Sanskrit transcribed into Cyrillic script. For input, there are two approaches:
   a. developing a keyboard layout or IME, in Keyman, xkb, or other input frameworks, and/or
   b. if you already have Sanskrit text in Latin or Devanagari or other scripts, there are conversion tools (online or offline) that can handle Indic and Sanskrit transliteration in particular. The key issue is whether the Cyrillic transcription system you want to use is similar to or different from existing Sanskrit (Cyrillic based) transcriptions systems. It may be possible to adapt some existing solutions.

It is possible that you may want both 2a and 2b, if you have existing Sanskrit texts, it would make more sense to convert them rather than retype them.

Andrew