Sanskrit / IAST Guidelines

Sanskrit and regional-language material must be typed in Unicode. Legacy encodings do not survive the publication pipeline and will be returned at screening.

Encoding

  • Unicode only. Legacy fonts — Sanskrit 99, Shreelipi, Baraha's older encodings and similar — produce characters that look right on your screen and are unreadable everywhere else.
  • Use a Unicode font that carries the full diacritic set. Do not substitute a plain letter for a diacritic.
  • Do not use combining characters where a precomposed one exists: ā as U+0101, not a followed by a combining macron.

Transliteration

  • IAST throughout, for all Sanskrit in an English text: ā ī ū ṛ ṝ ḷ ṃ ḥ ṅ ñ ṭ ṭh ḍ ḍh ṇ ś ṣ.
  • Do not mix IAST with ITRANS, Harvard-Kyoto, ISO 15919 or ad-hoc spellings within one article.
  • Devanāgarī may be used in addition to IAST where the script itself matters — a manuscript reading, a variant, a metrical point. Give the IAST alongside.
  • Regional-language material follows the standard transliteration for that language, stated once at first use.

Capitalisation and italics

  • Sanskrit terms in italics, lower case: pramāṇa, vyākaraṇa, ānvīkṣikī.
  • Proper names and text titles in roman with initial capitals: Nyāyasūtra, Patañjali, Kāśikāvṛtti. Text titles in italics on first mention where that is your convention — be consistent.
  • Terms fully naturalised in English are set in roman without diacritics: karma, yoga, guru, mantra, dharma, veda. Where such a term is used in its technical sense, restore the diacritics and the italics and say so.
  • Do not capitalise a Sanskrit common noun to signal importance.

Quotation and translation

  • Quotations of more than one line are set as an indented block, with the reference by text, chapter and verse.
  • Every substantial quotation carries a translation. Where the translation is your own, write “translation by author”; where it is not, cite the translator.
  • Give the edition used for any text central to the argument, and note significant variants.
  • Sandhi may be resolved in a quotation where it aids the reader, marked with a hyphen or a raised dot, applied consistently.

Abbreviations

  • Text abbreviations are permitted (NS for Nyāyasūtra, MBh for Mahābhāṣya) if listed in an abbreviations section before the references.
  • Reference a primary text as abbreviation chapter.verse — NS 1.1.4, MBh 1.1.1.

Practical note

If you are converting an older file, convert to Unicode before you write, not after. Post-hoc conversion routinely drops ṛ, ḷ and the retroflex series, and the errors are hard to see in proof.