Devanagari font support
This blog now has some Marathi content (in Devanagari). If you need any help with reading or writing text in Devanagari script, this note (and few links provided here) should help:
Over the years many solutions have been devised to support input and output of Indian scripts on computers, but standards and deployment of acceptable solutions have not been slow and not very consistent. Now the international standards and operating level support for them seem to have matured and stablized.
The future seems to point to the Unicode standard. (It is similar to ASCII, but provides supports for all scripts in the world.) This note refers to only the latest OS platforms (i.e., Mac OS X 10.4 or “Tiger”, and MS-Windows X), though the resource links given here may deal with older platforms.
Mac OS X:
- Mac OS X Tiger (10.4.x) provides very good support for Unicode “Indic scripts” (e.g., Devanagari) for both input and output. Their “Devanagari-QUERTY” input option under the “International” System Preferences section allows you to do data entry of Davanagari text very intuitive. Earlier versions of OS X did not have such good support for Davanagari.
MS-Windows (XP):
- Reading /Output – One needs to install support for “Indic scripts” from the XP OS CDs. Wikipedia info on Devanagari support is quite a compehensive.
- Writing/Input – Microsoft provides its own Input Method Editor (IME) software modules for data entry of “Indic scripts” text using standard keyboard. (You need to install this too.) But I prefer to use Baraha Direct, a utility which comes with Baraha software. It is a lot better than the keyboard mapping that MS-Windows Devanagari IME provides. Both allow you to use the normal PC keyboard to enter Devanagari text in English. The text is saved in appropriate Unicode characters and displayed on the screen in Devanagari! (I still find it magical.) The Baraha solution seems more intuitive or consistent compared to MS-Windows solution. Baraha folks started out with a complete software package that includes a word processing program also. But now with OS level support for Unicode (Davanagari) in the newer versions of the OS, presumably one can use Devanagari IME in all the standard applications (e.g., MS-Word, MS-IE). So Baraha folks have now put out a separate Baraha IME module just for data entry of “Indic scripts”. This is nice since it allows you to switch between English and Devanagari with one stroke of a function key! It also supports switching between multiple scripts (e.g., English, Devanagari, Kannada, Tamil), if you so desire.
Please note that earlier versions of MS-Windows do provide some support for Unicode Devanagari. But the whole growth in this area was fueled by browsers (i.e., web surfing), so support in different applications probably is not very consistent across the platform.
The following resources have a lot more info on this and other related topics.