UAST: Unicode Aware Sanskrit Transliteration
Dhruvil Dave, Aneri Dalwadi
TL;DR
The paper tackles the portability and input-friction problem of IAST-based Sanskrit transliteration by introducing UAST, a Unicode-aware system. It defines UAST-IO, an ASCII-friendly representation that maps non-ASCII diacritics to explicit ASCII tokens, and uses explicit virāma markers to bridge IAST and Devanāgarī. Key contributions include a case-insensitive, minimal-token design that preserves IAST semantics while enabling straightforward transpilation to both IAST and Devanāgarī with linear resources. This work aims to simplify cross-platform Sanskrit typesetting and improve interoperability across editors, scripts, and keyboard layouts.
Abstract
Devanāgarī is the writing system that is adapted by various languages like Sanskrit. International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a transliteration scheme for romanisation of Sanskrit language. IAST makes use of diacritics to represent various characters. On a computer, these are represented using Unicode standard which differs from how the Sanskrit language behaves at a very fundamental level. This results in an issue that is encountered while designing typesetting software for devanāgarī and IAST. We hereby discuss the problems and provide a solution that solves the issue of incompatibilities between various transliteration and encoding schemes. The base implementation that should be used is available at https://github.com/dhruvildave/uast.rs. Another implementation that extends UAST to around $10$ scripts is available at https://github.com/aneri0x4f/uast-cli and https://github.com/dhruvildave/uast .