[Buddha-l] Linux WP for Tibetan?

[Simon Wiles]

On Tue, 2011-12-13 at 21:18 -0700, Richard Hayes wrote:
> Have any of you had experience typesetting Tibetan or Sanskrit using the xeLaTeX macros? I had a bunch of Sanskrit material that I had typeset about fifteen years ago using EDMACS in plain TeX, which of course works well on all platforms. When LEDMACS came out for LaTeX, I found it was quite simple to put all my work into LEDMACS. And then xeLaTeX looked like the way to go for languages using scripts other than the Latin alphabet. I found xeLaTeX a bit frustrating at first, because I didn't properly understand how to make font calls, but once I got the hang of it (by availing myself of files Dominik Wujastyk had kindly put on the web), I found it really nice to work with.

LaTeX/XeLaTeX is very powerful, especially for proper publishing tasks,
where the FOSS offering is not particularly strong (Scribus doesn't
really cut the mustard (yet!), unfortunately).  If you combine XeLaTeX
with LyX, you can get a nice comfortable environment set up quite
easily.

> What I love about LaTeX is that it is relatively stable. New implementations are almost always fully backwards compatible. In contrast, I have a book and a whole bunch of lecture notes and articles that I processed using Final Word and its successor, Sprint, and some stuff in early versions of Word that are almost perfectly unusable now. All the work that went into producing those things has gone pretty much down the drain, along with the rest of my misspent youth.

OOo/LO has a LaTeX export filter which is surprisingly good
(http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center/writer2latex-1), and
can offer something of the best of both worlds.

simon