Glenn

You can ignore this mail, if you want.

Rustom,

Here is the context -

> Sorry I dont get the context.
> On my emacs 23.3.1 I can activate devanagari-aiba input method.
> Is there something else you want me to check?

Are you activating the input method like this - 

1. C-x C-m l Devanagari
2. C-\

Do you see a crash like this -

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (error "Can't activate input method `dev-aiba'")
  signal(error ("Can't activate input method `dev-aiba'"))
  error("Can't activate input method `%s'" "dev-aiba")
  activate-input-method("dev-aiba")
  toggle-input-method(nil 1)
  call-interactively(toggle-input-method nil nil)

> I dont know this input method (and google does not help) 

See [1]. They apparently has something to do with diacritic marks
(whatever that means).

> but looking at describe-input-method and trying out a bit it seems
> very close (identical??) to itrans.

See [2].  The table that compares two methods and is attached here for
future reference.  There are 12 entries in that table where the aiba and
itrans input methods differ.

I was wondering, as someone who is more familiar with Devanagari which
of these would you prefer as the input method.  If you think that you
have no particular opinion, I think we can leave the defaults as such.

Here is an entry for SHA.

,---- DEVANAGARI LETTER SHA with devanagari-itrans is mapped to "sha"
|              position: 9395 of 15548 (60%), column: 31
|             character: श (displayed as श) (codepoint 2358, #o4466, #x936)
|     preferred charset: unicode (Unicode (ISO10646))
| code point in charset: 0x0936
|                syntax: w 	which means: word
|              category: .:Base, L:Left-to-right (strong), i:Indian
|              to input: type "sha" with devanagari-itrans
|           buffer code: #xE0 #xA4 #xB6
|             file code: #xE0 #xA4 #xB6 (encoded by coding system utf-8-dos)
|               display: by this font (glyph code)
|     uniscribe:-outline-Mangal-normal-normal-normal-*-20-*-*-*-p-*-iso10646-1 (#x9E)
| 
| Character code properties: customize what to show
|   name: DEVANAGARI LETTER SHA
|   general-category: Lo (Letter, Other)
|   decomposition: (2358) ('श')
| 
| [back]
`----

,---- DEVANAGARI LETTER SHA with devanagari-itrans is mapped to "^sa"
|              position: 2855 of 5721 (50%), column: 22
|             character: श (displayed as श) (codepoint 2358, #o4466, #x936)
|     preferred charset: unicode (Unicode (ISO10646))
| code point in charset: 0x0936
|                syntax: w 	which means: word
|              category: .:Base, L:Left-to-right (strong), i:Indian
|              to input: type "^sa" with devanagari-aiba
|           buffer code: #xE0 #xA4 #xB6
|             file code: #xE0 #xA4 #xB6 (encoded by coding system utf-8-dos)
|               display: by this font (glyph code)
|     uniscribe:-outline-Mangal-normal-normal-normal-*-20-*-*-*-p-*-iso10646-1 (#x9E)
| 
| Character code properties: customize what to show
|   name: DEVANAGARI LETTER SHA
|   general-category: Lo (Letter, Other)
|   decomposition: (2358) ('श')
| 
| [back]
`----

Footnotes: 

[1] http://texa.human.is.tohoku.ac.jp/aiba/codes/table/draft/r02/html/

Document has following particulars.

,---- 
| Word Processing in Tibetan and Sanskrit
| Toru AIBA
| 
| Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University
| March 2000
| 
| Handout for my presentation at "Fourth International Symposium on
| Multilingual Information Processing" at Tsukuba in March 26, 2000.
`----

[2] Image captioned "Table 3: Transliteration Schemes in Sanskrit
(Substitutional)",