1. The problem
One of the first problems we had to deal with in publishing Sanskrit- related material on the Internet is the lack of a standard codepage for representing Sanskrit characters that is suited for use with modern operating systems.

2. CS and CSX encodings
The CS and CSX encodings are a de-facto standard used by the majority of South Asian scholars. They have been designed for the original IMB PC and the DOS operating system 1 using the default US codepage. One of the main problems encountered in working with CS and CSX encodings is the lack of special characters for most European languages. Many acute and grave vowels have been replaced by Sanskrit diacritics. This makes impossible to use only a CS or CSX font in a document containg Sanskrit together with languages such as French, German, Italian, Spanish.

3. The Unicode standard
The Unicode standard is already implemented in Windows NT systems but does not represent a viable solution to our problems since many operating systems do not have built-in support for it. Moreover, special fonts based on the Unicode standard and designed for WWW publishing, such as Bitstream's Cyberbit 2 are still under development and won't be available for a while.

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