Sanskrit Font Display Help

This page explains how to view text in Sanskrit.

Sanskrit words in Perseus are encoded in the Harvard-Kyoto system, a standard transliteration that can be read on any system. It is analogous to the use of Beta Code for Greek. Unless you select a different display form, this is how Sanskrit will appear on your screen.

The following list gives the Harvard-Kyoto representations for the Sanskrit letters, in Sanskrit alphabetical order:

a A i I u U R RR L LL e ai o au M H
k kh g gh G
c ch j jh J
T Th D Dh N
t th d dh n
p ph b bh m
y r l v
z S s h
Anunasika = w
retroflex l = f
udatta accent = /

In books written in the West for non-specialists (especially for classicists), Sanskrit is usually shown in a romanized form. In this system, retroflex consonants and vocalic 'r' and 'l' are written with dots under them. Most web browsers cannot show letters with under-dots, however, unless you have a special font. If you are using Unicode (see the Greek font help for more details), your ordinary display font can probably display these letters, so you may choose "Romanization" for your Sanskrit display. If you are not using Unicode, but can install a True-Type font, you may use the TITUS Indo-Iranisch font from the TITUS project; a direct link to the font download page is here. Note that this is a monospace font. Perseus does not support or maintain this font but provides this link as a convenience.

If you are familiar with the Devanagari writing system, however, you may prefer to see Sanskrit written this way. If you are using Unicode, you may select "Devanagari" for your Sanskrit display. You will need a Unicode font that includes the Devanagari characters; the font you normally use for display may not include this subset of the Unicode character set.

The Configure Display tool does not allow you to select a specific font for Sanskrit text. If your system uses Unicode (more strictly, if Perseus pages are presented to you in UTF-8 encoding), you may choose either romanization or Devanagari, and these characters will be displayed in the same font as the rest of the page. If your system does not use Unicode, only TITUS Indo-Iranisch will work; Perseus does not support Devanagari on non-Unicode systems.