A user-friendly tool for metrical analysis of Sanskrit verse

This paper describes the design and implementation of a tool that assists readers of metrical verse in Sanskrit (and other languages/literatures with similar prosody). It is open-source, and available online as a web application, as a command-line tool and as a software library. It handles both varṇavṛtta and mātrāvṛtta metres. It has many features for usability without placing strict demands on its users. These include allowing input in a wide variety of transliteration schemes, being fairly robust against typographical or metrical errors in the input, and “aligning” the given verse in light of the recognized metre. This paper describes the various components of the system and its user interface, and details of interest such as the heuristics used in the identifier and the dynamic-programming algorithm used for displaying results. Although originally and primarily designed to help readers, the tool can also be used for additional applications such as detecting metrical errors in digital texts (its very first version identified 23 errors in a Sanskrit text from an online corpus), and generating statistics about metres found in a larger text or corpus. These applications are illustrated here, along with plans for future improvements.