Transliteration schemes, Romanisation

Main articles: Devanagari transliteration and International Alphabet of Sanskrit

Transliteration

Since the late 18th century, Sanskrit has been transliterated using the Latin
alphabet. The system most commonly used today is the IAST (International Alphabet
of Sanskrit Transliteration), which has been the academic standard since 1888.
ASCII-based transliteration schemes have also evolved because of difficulties
representing Sanskrit characters in computer systems. These include Harvard-Kyoto
and ITRANS, a transliteration scheme that is used widely on the Internet,
especially in Usenet and in email, for considerations of speed of entry as well as
rendering issues. With the wide availability of Unicode-aware web browsers, IAST
has become common online. It is also possible to type using an alphanumeric
keyboard and transliterate to Devanagari using software like Mac OS X's
international support.

European scholars in the 19th century generally preferred Devanagari for the
transcription and reproduction of whole texts and lengthy excerpts. However,
references to individual words and names in texts composed in European Languages
were usually represented with Roman transliteration. From the 20th century onwards,
because of production costs, textual editions edited by Western scholars have
mostly been in Romanised transliteration.[278]