The impetus to prepare electronic texts of devotional hymns came out of
the interest of a dedicated group of individuals of Indian origin living
in St. John's in Canada, who had no previous exposure to scriptures, but
were keen to learn. Facilities for producing electronic texts in Oriental languages were somewhat limited in the mid 1990s, but with the then available fonts in Telugu (Pothana) and Tamil (Mylai), a selected set of commonly chanted Stôtrā-s was initially put together for the benefit of this group. Nominal tutoring was provided and the project was very successful. This initial set of Stôtrā-s together with a few additions is catalogued now as "Stôtramālikā" in the reformatted Archives.
The scope of the compilation was subsequently enlarged
to cover a broader range of Stôtrā-s and Mantrā-s.
The motivation to archive the texts on the internet came
through the keen support of the St. John's Stôtra group and the contact with
Dr.K.Kalyanasundaram of Lausanne in Switzerland who has been making a significant voluntary contribution in the cultural sphere through the internet and was generous to share his experience in building web sites.
POTHANA Telugu font was initially used for the texts presented in these pages.
With the availability of language software like
BARAHA and
the ease of conversion of multilingual texts, the bulk of the Archive is now in BARAHA fonts. POTHANA font was developed by
Dr. K. Desikachary
of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and his contribution while initially starting this compilation is gratefully acknowledged.
The input of the St. John's "Stôtra study group" while
putting together these pages in its initial stages is appreciated.
Periodic upgrades to Windows operating system and
browsers has
necessitated frequent format changes to older
HTML files in Indian Languages.
To avoid the need for frequent revisions or
inconvenience to viewers due to changing standards,
the entire Stôtra collection is now archived in PDF format.
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