International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration

It is based on a scheme that emerged during the 19th century from suggestions by Charles Trevelyan, William Jones, Monier Monier-Williams and other scholars, and formalised by the Transliteration Committee of the Geneva Oriental Congress, in September 1894.

The Tenth International Congress of Orientalists, held at Geneva on 10 September 1894, adopted the following notations:[2][3] For the short e and o, the Committee also recommended the use of ĕ and ŏ, respectively.

For the most part, IAST is a subset of ISO 15919 that merges the retroflex (underdotted) liquids with the vocalic ones (ringed below) and the short close-mid vowels with the long ones.

The following seven exceptions are from the ISO standard accommodating an extended repertoire of symbols to allow transliteration of Devanāgarī and other Indic scripts, as used for languages other than Sanskrit.

Linux/Unix and BSD desktop environments allow one to set up custom keyboard layouts and switch them by clicking a flag icon in the menu bar.

Users of SCIM on Linux based platforms can also have the opportunity to install and use the sa-itrans-iast input handler which provides complete support for the ISO 15919 standard for the romanization of Indic languages as part of the m17n library.

Only certain fonts support all the Latin Unicode characters essential for the transliteration of Indic scripts according to the IAST and ISO 15919 standards.

For example, the Arial, Tahoma and Times New Roman font packages that come with Microsoft Office 2007 and later versions also support precomposed Unicode characters like ī.

Accordingly, many academics working in the area of Sanskrit studies make use of free OpenType fonts such as FreeSerif or Gentium, both of which have complete support for the full repertoire of conjoined diacritics in the IAST character set.