ITRANS and ITRANS Engine

Date: 7 Feb 2003 23:49:24 -0800
Newsgroups: rec.music.indian.misc
Size: 8,861 bytes

There are some confusions about the ITRANS Scheme and
its association with ITRANS software (ITRANS Engine).
As per my personal view, I do not see the ITRANS Scheme
independent of ITRANS Software (Engine),
ITRANS transliteration scheme was developed by Avinash when
he developed the ITRANS Software (Engine) and is to be used
with ITRANS Software, though latter other software came that
tried to follow the same standards as set by Avinash's ITRANS
(software as well as Scheme).
The old RMIMers may be familiar with it but may be it is helpful
at this point to read again to the following histroy of ITRANS
and ISB by Avinash and Anurag Shankar (creater of ITRANS song
format) in their own words.
(I would also try to post the original declaration of isong format
by Anurag, I am sorry for cutting and pasting the following
extra ordinarily long text for some obvious reasons, the
original text can be read at-
http://chandra.astro.indiana.edu/isongs/hyperFAQ/a1.11.html)
regards
devendra
-----------
beginning quote
-----------
1.11. What is the history behind the ISB?
Avinash Chopde <email-address-deleted> writes:
"In 1988, I suddenly developed an interest in Indian
language scripts. I soon found why most vendors were
peddling raw fonts out there - direct use of the font
makes it very difficult to enter Indic script text.
So I started the development of ITRANS, a freeware
(I)ndian language (TRANS)literation tool, as a front-end
for the TeX typesetting tool. ITRANS is table-driven which
makes it easy support nearly every Indian Language Script.
When it came time to provide some sample documents with
the ITRANS package, I decided to transliterate a few
Hindi Film songs (the most popular Indian documents by far),
and include it with the ITRANS package. Initially, there
were 3 songs that were packaged with the ITRANS archive.
Even though I wrote ITRANS, my knowledge of Indian
Languages is very poor. This meant that the songs contained
many mistakes. The first songs were taken off the usenet
newsgroup rec.music.indian.misc (RMIM), and I remember
that Anurag Shankar, who now manages the Song Book, was
around at that time, and even e-mailed me corrections to
the sample songs provided.
As time went on, the activity on rec.music.indian.misc
picked up, I realized that we had a opportunity to create
a archive of Indian Language Documents, starting with Hindi
Songs. This archive would use ITRANS, so would be readable
in English on simple ASCII terminals, and because it used ITRANS,
it would also be possible to get the song printed in the Hindi
Script...seeing the lyrics of a song, or the words of a
popular document in the native Indic Script is just something
else! It is so much more comfortable reading Indic Script as
opposed to reading it in English encoding...
So since ITRANS bridged these two worlds, English input
and Hindi output, I started posting notices on RMIM,
letting people know that ITRANS existed, and asked everyone
to post songs to that newsgroup using ITRANS encoding
since that would allow us to print the songs in Hindi too.
Of course, things were very slow in the early days,
and I had to manually edit the posts, and convert them to
ITRANS transliteration. Though it was slow going, it was
clear to me that it would be quite possible to start a
new project: to create and collect and archive popular
documents of Indian Culture --- starting off with the most
popular item, the Hindi Film Songs!
This is how the ITRANS Song Book then split off ITRANS,
and became its own project. This was sometime around the
early 90s. In the early days, I used to monitor RMIM very
closely, save any message that contained song lyrics
and then transliterat it and add it to the Song Book.
Still, even with all my work, it was very slow going,
and over a year or two, I only managed to make the collection
only go upto around 200 songs. But then things started to gain
momentum, along with the more wide-spread use of the usenet
newsgroups. More people started to get enthusiastic about
the Song Book, and started contributing transliterated
documents.
A project like the Song Book succeeds only because of
the contributions of many, many, individuals, and a record
of all the persons who contributed to a song or document is
available in each document in the collection. Though
it would be impossible to list every one who provided major
help for this project, I can single out the first group of
people who moved this Song Book from being a single-person
project to a Internet-wide effort, and the persons who made
that transition for this project were: C. S. Sudarshana
Bhat, Venkatasubramanian K Gopalakrishnan, Satish Subramanian,
Ravi Rai, and Anurag Shankar.
Their help marked the beginning of the explosion in the size
of the Song Book collection. From under 200, it went to over
600, and then soon to 900. The Song Book now also includes a
large collection of Marathi and Sanskrit documents, in addition
to the Hindi Film Songs.
This is how it all started, and just when it was getting too
big for me to handle, supporting both ITRANS and the
ITRANS Song Book, Anurag Shankar stepped in, and since 1994,
he has been making the ISB more easily accessible over the
Internet by developing WWW tools to make browsing easier.
He now handles the Song Book editing and expansion, and the
popularity of this song book is easily ascertained by the number
of hits Anurag's WWW page gets every day (over a thousand!).
Today, Anurag's ITRANS Song Book collection contains
around 1300 songs!"
Anurag Shankar <email-address-deleted> continues:
"While surfing the net one day at the Univ. of Illinois in
Urbana (where I was a grad student at the time) around 1989-90,
I came across this thing called ITRANS (and later across a
collection of songs known as the "ITRANS Song Book"). Being an
eternal hacker, I immediately ftp'd it and decided to install
ITRANS on the local Unix box so I could create my own songs
and view the hindi songs on the screen. I contacted Avinash
for help with installation and we ultimately succeeded in
getting it to work.
When I saw the first hindi song on the screen,
I was horrified to see a large number of spelling errors
staring back at me (hindi is my native language, you see).
As I looked at the errors in the second, third, .... song,
man, I just couldn't handle it! Almost instintively,
I began to fix the errors. Days later, when I realized that
I had fixed a good fraction of the archive (I was fixing them
just for myself, really), it occurred to me that I could give
the corrected version back to Avinash for his next release.
One thing led to another, and I soon found myself editing
a lot of the old and new songs (checking and fixing errors)
for Avinash (which explains the origin of a large number of
"Editor: Anurag Shankar ..." entries in the headers). We also
hooked up with Ravi Rai at North Dakota State Univ. who was
collecting a lot of the songs from RMIM and transliterating them.
(Oh, and I had moved to Univ. of Arizona and then to
Indiana University in the meantime as an astronomy postdoc).
Being busy with other projects, Avinash suggested sometime
in early fall 1994 (right after he released ISB 2.1) that
I take over the ISB coordination efforts full time, an offer
which I found appealing because I enjoyed working on the ISB
so much (I am totally addicted to old hindi film songs
and the net).
While at Indiana, I received a grant from the American
Astronomical Society which allowed me to purchase a Silicon
Graphics Unix workstation (which I named chandra). With my very
own Unix box, I decided it was time to learn all about serving
web documents. I obtained and installed the NCSA httpd web
server on chandra. The ISB immediately came to mind as
something which could REALLY benefit from a migration to
the web. (Besides, it was a damn good pilot project for me
to learn how to populate and run my web server.) I started
hacking away and did my first ISB release (2.12) featuring
public web access in September 1994.
As I started developing scripts for automating various
administrative chores, I decided that, since the large number
of independent formats for the pstats (and the lyrics) which
existed at the time were too hard for me to process in scripts,
all songs should be converted to a "frozen format". Natually,
this took quite a while as I had to first work with Avinash and
others to agree on a format and then to hack a large perl
script to actually do the difficult conversion. The work was
finished and ISB 3.0 was finally released to the public in late
March 1995 (it featured the frozen song format which I consider
to be my major contribution to the ISB). The web
version of the ISB also featured a searchable song database
made possible by this frozen format."
------------
end of quote
------------