SansConverter for Obsidian

An Obsidian plugin for converting between Sanskrit transliteration encodings. Based on the SansConverter desktop app.

Supported Encodings

• IAST (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration)
• Balaram (used in many Vaiṣṇava publications, legacy)
• Harvard-Kyoto (ASCII-friendly encoding)
• Velthius (ASCII-friendly encoding using digraphs)
• Ukrainian IAST (Cyrillic-based transliteration)

Available Conversions

From	To
Harvard-Kyoto	IAST
Harvard-Kyoto	Ukrainian
Velthius	IAST
Velthius	Ukrainian
Balaram (legacy)	IAST
Balaram (legacy)	Ukrainian
IAST	Balaram (legacy)
IAST	Ukrainian
IAST	Harvard-Kyoto
Ukrainian	IAST

Installation

Manual Installation

1. Download main.js and manifest.json from the latest release
2. Create a folder <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/sansconverter/ and place both files there
3. Reload Obsidian
4. Go to Settings → Community plugins and enable "SansConverter"

Using BRAT (Beta Reviewers Auto-update Tester)

1. Install BRAT from Community Plugins
2. Open BRAT settings and click "Add Beta plugin"
3. Enter this repository URL: https://github.com/kosperun/obsidian-sansconverter
4. Enable the plugin in Community plugins

Usage

1. Select the text you want to convert
2. Open the command palette (Cmd/Ctrl + P)
3. Search for "Convert selection" and choose your desired conversion
4. The selected text will be replaced with the converted version

Setting Hotkeys

For faster workflow, assign custom hotkeys:

1. Go to Settings → Hotkeys
2. Search for "SansConverter"
3. Assign your preferred key combinations

Suggested hotkeys:

• Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + I → IAST → Balaram
• Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + B → Balaram → IAST
• etc.

Examples

Input (Balaram, legacy)	Output (IAST)
Kåñëa	Kṛṣṇa

Input (Harvard-Kyoto)	Output (IAST)
KRSNa	Kṛṣṇa

Input (Velthius)	Output (IAST)
K.r.s.na	Kṛṣṇa

Input (IAST)	Output (Ukrainian)
Kṛṣṇa	Кр̣шн̣а

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to submit issues or pull requests.

License

MIT License - see LICENSE for details.