Al Bairuni's India Essay

Proof of 18 January 2001

Alberuni’s India

WARNING: THIS IS AN EXPERIMENTAL AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED LAY-OUT.
Problems in printing
1. Arabic not yet supported, an automatic ad-hoc transcription in brackets is used.
2. Tables can come out far too wide.
3. Marginal notes are printed in the text, in a smaller type in brackets.
4. Vulgar fractions appear as a division.
5. The material has not yet been proof read!
TEI header
Alberuni’s India Abu Al-Rahain Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Alberuni, 973?–1048 Edward C. Sachau, 1845–1930
(Translator and Editor) 2 vols. (50 + 408 + 431 p = 889 p) 1910, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd.,
London
Copyright status: U.S. Expired. E.U. Expired 1 Jan 1981, revived 1995, will expire again 1 Jan 2001. Berne
Conv. Expired 1 Jan 1981.
Approximate size: 1.6 Megabyte
Introduction to the electronic edition
The Indika of Alberuni gives us a rare insight to the habits, customs, and beliefs of Hindu India as a the
writer saw it in 1030 A.D.
An electronic edition of this work offers a lot of benefits. First of all, it enables fast searching through the
text, and quickly jumping to notes and the sources of quoted texts (when these become available in electronic
format). Second, it can be distributed at a much lower cost than the printed version, which, although still
sometimes reprinted in India, can be quite difficult to obtain.
A further benefit, for modern readers, is that the numerous Arabic and Greek quotations can be automatically
transliterated, using a single toggle on the reading software, and that imperial units of measurement can be
converted to their metric equivalents with the same ease.
Production
The electronic edition of Sachau’s translation of Alberuni’s Indica poses several challenges to the encoder.
First of all, the large size of the work and the large number of diacritics make it difficult to process the work
on ordinary word processers. The fragments in Greek, Arabic, Syriac, and Hebrew script, the large...