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Szántó, Selected Chapters from the Catuṣpīṭhatantra (2012)

Required reading for tantric studies specialists:

Péter-Dániel Szántó. ‘Selected Chapters from the Catuṣpīṭhatantra’. Vol.1: Introductory study with the annotated translation of selected chapters. Vol. 2: Appendix volume with critical editions of selected chapters accompanied by Bhavabhaṭṭa’s commentary and a bibliography. D. Phil. diss., Oxford University, December 16 2012. Viewable at academia.edu [v.1, 2].

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Modular Infotech’s Unicode Devanāgarī fonts

High-quality Devanāgarī fonts suitable for professional typesetting are still hard to come by. One foundry producing fonts to something like the required standard is Pune-based Modular Infotech. They offer true bold faces and true italics. Refer to their specimen (published 2004, but apparently still current):

Modular Infotech Typefaces Catalog (2004:2)
Modular Infotech Typefaces Catalog (2004:2)

Since I haven’t used any of Modular Infotech’s fonts at the time of writing – they don’t come cheap – this is not yet a recommendation. Meanwhile, it’s possible to do some limited testing at fonts.com by clicking ‘TRY IT’ and typing a Unicode Devanāgarī string.

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Pandey’s Siddham Script in Unicode proposal (2012/8)

Anshuman Pandey. ‘Proposal to Encode the Siddham Script in ISO/IEC 10646’. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N4294 L2/12-234R. PDF. 2012/08/01.

Mr. Pandey’s proposal – now no longer preliminary – promises to fill yet another gaping hole in the standard encoding of important Indic scripts. Now would be an appropriate time to comment, if you haven’t already commented.

(I would hope, at minimum, for the addition of a full set of ten digits in the final proposal. Often such basics fall through the gaps because the corpus of readily available primary material is so limited. Here‘s a nice “7-8th century” bilingual manuscript with a varṇamālā (no digits, though) which is both in good condition and readable online, thanks to the care of its Japanese custodians. Incidentally, this clearly confirms that two of the “Punctuation and ornaments” in Pandey’s Fig. 33 are ornamental final anusvāra [अं字].)

Comments should be emailed to Anshuman Pandey, whose address is given in the N4294 proposal (link above) and at the bottom of his personal website (link).

ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N4294 Fig.1. Proposed code chart.