Popularity
IAST is the most popular transliteration scheme for romanization of Sanskrit and Pāḷi. It is often used in printed publications, especially for books dealing with ancient Sanskrit and Pāḷi topics related to Indian religions. With the wider availability of Unicode fonts, it is also increasingly used for electronic texts.
The script is, however, insufficient to represent both Sanskrit and Pāḷi on the same page properly, owing to confusion of the vowel l sign in Sanskrit (here ḷ) and the need for the same sign for the retroflexive consonant ḷ, which is found in Pāḷi. Here it is better to follow Unicode and ISO 15919, which is in any case a more comprehensive scheme.
IAST is based on a standard established by the International Congress of Orientalists at Geneva in 1894. It allows a lossless transliteration of Devanāgarī (and other Indic scripts, such as Śāradā script), and as such represents not only the phonemes of Sanskrit, but allows essentially phonetic transcription (e.g. Visarga ḥ is an allophone of word-final r and s).
The National Library at Kolkata romanization, intended for the romanization of all Indic scripts, is an extension of IAST.
Read more about this topic: International Alphabet Of Sanskrit Transliteration
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