Last updated on December 5, 2010
Sanscript is an online transliterator. All modern Indian scripts are supported. Sanscript supports the full ITRANS standard for Sanskrit and Devanagari.
Here's how you start. Choose a source script in the "From:" field and a destination script in the "To:" field. Put the text you want to transliterate into the left box. Then, click the blue arrow ➠ to run the program. If you click the double arrows ↔, the left and right sides are switched.
The quality of your result depends on your computer's font support.
If you are translating from a Roman rendition, you can tell Sanscript to transliterate only certain parts of your input text. When you want to disable transliteration, type ##. You can enable transliteration by typing ## again. Below is a sample transliteration from ITRANS to Devanagari.
You can also disable transliteration on just one character by using the backslash character \. The backslash is used in many programs to take special letters and make them normal. If you've never used the backslash like this before, I recommend just using ##.
Some scripts, like Devanagari, can produce complex symbols that are combinations of many other letters. These symbols can be quite confusing, and some of them are not used in modern Devanagari. Fortunately, there's an easy way to prevent them: we use a special "invisible character." This character tells your computer to make text look a certain way. When transliterating from ITRANS, you can insert this character by typing {}. You can also insert it with _. Below are some examples from ITRANS-to-Devanagari transliteration.
How should Sanscript transliterate to Devanagari? Choose an option below:
Regardless of your choice, you can always type .h in ITRANS to do "Sanskrit-style" transliteration.
Q: Why doesn't Sanscript transliterate as I type?
Sanscript is meant to do one thing well. Its purpose is to be a small but speedy transliteration tool for people dealing with Sanskrit texts and documents (although by happy coincidence Hindi and some other languages are fully supported). In fact, Sanscript was designed under the guidance of the owner of sanskritdocuments.org to be a fast program for processing Sanskrit text. Live transliteration would require some additions to the code, and these additions would become major if Sanscript also had to account for approximate transliterations.
If you're still looking for live transliteration tools, there are plenty of other programs you can use, including Google's own transliteration software. But Sanscript is meant for a different kind of transliteration.
Q: Will you add full support for other Indic scripts, like Telugu?
The short answer: yes, eventually.
As in the case of live translation I hadn't thought about implementing this feature. In truth, Sanscript was meant for Sanskrit from the start. However, I think it would be nice if Sanscript could better live up to its name. The original name was a simple pun on "Sanskrit" and "script" — as in "web script" or "Javascript" — but at the risk of sounding like a nairukta, I'll say that it could also be seen as "sans script," i.e. a tool that seamlessly converts the whole of one script into the next. (An even better name might be "Transcript" !)
I think that it wouldn't be too hard to update the code to support sounds like the short vowels that feature so commonly in South Indian scripts like Telugu, but these days I'm short on time. As of December 5 2010, I still need to finish the grammar guide and make it more usable and user-friendly. For me, that is a bigger priority.
You can contact me either through the contact form or at .
I use a Javascript compressor/obfuscator to minimize the file size. So, the current code will be almost indecipherable. You can view the original code here. The code is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License.