Use of special fonts - Compiling in Scrivener a text containing romanised Sanskrit diacritics.

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

Hi,

I have trouble successfully using romanised Sanskrit transliteration fonts with Scrivener.

Note:( Quotation from Wikipedia): The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a transliteration scheme that allows the lossless romanisation of Indic scripts as employed by Sanskrit and related Indic languages.

Here is what I’ve done:

  1. I imported the text of a book (containing those Sanskrit fonts), by copying and pasting.
  2. When I pasted the copied text in the scrivener editor the fonts didn’t display properly.
  3. I then installed those fonts on my Macbook pro and that particular font became available on the list of fonts in the Font’s drop down menu in Scrivener.
  4. I then highlighted the entire text and changed the whole body of text to ‘Balaram’ font, which is one of the fonts that display romanised Sanskrit texts with diacritics.
    4.1. The text in the in the Main editor was displaying correctly.
  5. I then compiled the text into a book in the mobi format.
  6. Next I opened the mobi file in my KIndle for Mac software on my Mac laptop and the Sanscrit diacritics were not displaying correctly.

Here is an example of how the text looked after compiling. (I’ve tried compiling as a PDF/Mobi file formats):

In the Çeña-khaëòa, Caitanya Mahäprabhu’s remaining eighteen years in Néläcala is described.

In this book, although numerous pastimes are related about Çré Caitanya Mahäprabhu, Çrila Vedavyäsa will later tell them all in detail. Nityänanda finds endless joy in glorifying Lord Caitanya, and He is an unmatched expert in that art.

And here is how the text should look like when the diacritics are properly displayed.

[attachment=0]Example of properly rendered romanised Sanskrit font .png[/attachment]

  1. I transferred the the mobi file to my Kindle reader and the text again was displaying wrongly.

Could someone help me get this font (The name of the font I used is ‘Balarama’, but there are many similar Sanskrit fonts, e.g : ScaGoudy, ScaGoudyBold, ScaGoudyItalic, ScaHelvetica, ScaHelveticaBold etc. ) to properly display after compiling in Scrivener?

I have other mobi format ebooks on my Kindle reader that display correctly the romanised Sanskrit diacritics fonts. But I can’t figure out what I am doing wrong?

Can anyone help?

2

See:

https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/fonts-in-scrivener-document-not-showing-up-in-ebook-formats/41164/3

You would need to licence the font and then use another tool to embed it in an ebook.

Best

L

3

Did you create those books that display properly or did you install them from some source. Your problem is that eReaders only have limited font sets, so those books must have had that font embedded. I don’t think Scrivener compile to ePub/Mobi enables font embedding for licensing reasons, so you’d need to post-process in some software that enables you to do so.

:slight_smile:

Mark

4

Hello,

You should use Kokila for Sanskrit and Junicode for transliteration texts. Both are open source fonts. You can change the sanskrit text by selecting the same. Do note that transliteration text has many issues in scrivener. It marks them as error and dictonaries are very difficult to install. I have a whole dictionary of more then 3500 words of transliterated words, which I cannot install in scrivener. I have not switched to scrivener because of this reason.