# UAST: Unicode Aware Sanskrit Transliteration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.14277 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14277/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Modeling Romanized Hindi and Bengali: Dataset Creation and Multilingual LLM Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22769/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Devan=agar=i is the writing system that is adapted by various languages like Sanskrit. International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a transliteration scheme for romanisation of Sanskrit language. IAST makes use of diacritics to represent various characters. On a computer, these are represented using Unicode standard which differs from how the Sanskrit language behaves at a very fundamental level. This results in an issue that is encountered while designing typesetting software for devan=agar=i and IAST. We hereby discuss the problems and provide a solution that solves the issue of incompatibilities between various transliteration and encoding schemes. The base implementation that should be used is available at https://github.com/dhruvildave/uast.rs. Another implementation that extends UAST to around 10 scripts is available at https://github.com/aneri0x4f/uast-cli and https://github.com/dhruvildave/uast .