Sanskrit Transliteration - itrans53

It looks like a pretty daunting task, with no guarantee things will work under the current system.

Have you tried the online version?

What do you want to translate into what?

Found this website the other day – seems pretty cool.

http://www.giitaayan.com/x.htm

What is it exactly that you are trying to do? Other than the Dvorak/QWERTY problem, it seems that installing Fink, X11, Ghostscript, Tex, ITRANS and lord knows what else is a really long way around. Are you trying to prepare a high quality typeset book?

Do you have a huge amount of text that has been typed in one of the Romanized schemes and you want to change it to Devanagari?

Personally I really like the unicode font that comes with the OSX. It is quite pretty.

So what is the end goal here?

Then I tried to install the itrans53 program
but I only got error messages.

The problem may be that things have changed considerably since Jaguar and itrans53 might need a lot of fixing to work with what is now in OS X.

I would still be curious to know what, if any, the shortcomings of the online version are for your work.

Other then that I am in search for the best fonts
and easiest to use.

There is only one OS X font for Unicode Devanagari, Devanagari MT. Windows fonts cannot be used for correct display. If you are going to work in a non-Unicode format, like XDVNG, you may be able to find more options with a Google search.

For IAST Latin transliteration, there are a lot of fonts with the necessary characters. One that was especially aimed at this , I think, is Gandhari Unicode:

http://andrewglass.org/fonts.php

However, if you are working in a non-Unicode format, then you will need one of the CX+ fonts.

If the final output of your work is designed to be put on the Internet or electronic distribution (rather than printed), I would strongly recommend you use the Unicode stuff, as it eliminates the need for readers to install special fonts.