Using LaTeX to Typeset a Marāthī-English Dictionary

Abstract

We are using LaTeX to typeset an old Marāthī-English dictionary, dated 1857. Marāthīis the official language of Mahārāshtra, a western state of India. Marāthī is written using the Devanāgarīscript. The printed edition of the dictionary contains approximately 1000 Royal Quarto size ($9\frac{1}{2}'' \times 12\frac{2}{3}''$) pages with around 60,000 words. The roots of the words come from many languages including Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian. Therefore the original dictionary contains at least three different scripts along with many esoteric punctuation marks and symbols that are not used nowadays.

We have finished typesetting 100 pages of the original dictionary. We present our experiences in typesetting this long work involving Devanāgarīand Roman script. For typesetting in Devanāgarīscript we used the devnag package. We have not yet added the roots in other scripts but that extension can be achieved with the help of ArabTeX. We want to publish the dictionary in electronic format, so we generated output in pdf format using pdfLaTeX. The bookmarks and cross-references make navigation easy. In the future it would be possible to design the old punctuation marks and symbols with the help of metafont.