Indic Fonts in Windows

[Thomas B. Ridgeway]

Lance Nelson writes,
> 
> I've ftp'd two Indic fonts and loaded them into Windows, one True Type
> from HACC and another ATM-Bitstream from the Liverpool computer.  I've
> been trying them out in WinWord 6.0a.  They work fine as screen
> and printer fonts.
> 
> My problem is that WinWord uses the Windows system font in dialogue
> boxes.  Therefore, both the Find/Replace functions and the Spelling functions
> don't work properly with the special characters.  I've modified my
> keyboard in WinWord to input the characters, and again this works fine
> except in the dialogue boxes.  Has anyone worked through this problem?  Is
> a system font with the special characters needed?  Would I have the same
> problems in AmiPro or Word Perfect?  Any advice is much appreciated.
> 
  I believe what we mean is that Find/Replace doesn't show the
right characters as you type them in in the find dialog box?  It should
acutally go on and conduct the search if you type in the right codes.

I've taken a look at this; one can change the system font so as to get a 
font with the indic chars as the system font, but most applications do not 
use the system font in dialogue boxes, but rather use something like MS Sans.
You would expect to find the same situation in Ami, you will definitely
find the same situation in WPWin.  One could make up a new font and 
have it masquerade as MS Sans, but I don't know whether this would
work out well.

N.B.  blackbox.hacc.washington.edu in pub/indic/outlines now has some
software to facilitate typing in romanized indic in any (well, most any) 
windows program.  It is based on the freeware 'Compose' keyboard remapper.
Some documentation is also included.  See the UPDATES file for details.

cheers,
Tom