Indic Fonts in Windows

[Thomas B. Ridgeway]

Good Day to you all,
  Continuing the extremely uninteresting, to many, subject of
romanized indic character sets in Windows, I continue to follow
a point raised by Lance Nelson.  Those uninterested may skip
the remainder, EXCEPT, those using the HACCIndic fonts for any purpose
may want to see point (c) below for news of a new font.

Lance wrote:
> 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. . . .
> Would I have the same
> problems in AmiPro or Word Perfect?

{For the remainder of this discussion 'posted' means made available for
anonymous ftp in directory pub/indic/outlines on the ftp server
   blackbox.hacc.washington.edu   [128.95.200.1]
If you don't understand ftp, find an internet guru at your locality.}

  a) the system font
     The system font as such is mostly seen in menus and status bars.
  it can indeed be replaced by an alternate font which might contain an
  indic character set.  I have posted a freeware utility for preparing
  an alternate system font: take the file sysfon10.zip, unzip it, read the
  author's note, and have at it.  IT WOULD BE WISE TO MAKE COPIES OF YOUR
  WIN.INI AND SYSTEM.INI FILES BEFORE MAKING ANY ALTERATIONS TO YOUR SYSTEM.
  You may wish to restore the prior state of windows later.
     Since the system font is not, in general, used in dialog boxes, however,
  replacing the system font does little to resolve the problem Lance
  raised, so you may not want to bother.  On the other hand, this may well
  be the font used by your application to print some messages, e.g.
  'Could not find the search string "mahaa"!'

  b) many applications use the MS Sans Serif bitmap fonts in dialog boxes.
  If the supplied_with_Windows_MS_Sans_Serif fonts are replaced by fonts
  containing an Indic character set which falsely claim to be MS Sans Serif,
  then most applications will use the substituted fonts and unknowingly
  provide indic characters (whether you currently happen to 
  be typing in indic or not).  
    I have posted two bitmap font sets named sserife.fon and sseriff.fon
  which are rough (in the case of sserife.fon, very rough) with character
  sets matching the HACCIndic family.  They may be substituted for the
  Windows-supplied fonts of the same name AFTER YOU HAVE MADE BACKUP 
  COPIES OF YOUR ORIGINALS FIRST please (pardon me for shouting).
  Not all applications use this font so you may not achieve the intended
  result.  E.g. Microsoft Word for Windows 2.0 does not use the MS 
  Sans Serif fonts, but rather uses an MS Dialog font which it loads
  into windows when it starts up, and unloads on quitting.  I don't know
  what the situation is with WinWord6; perhaps someone who has a copy
  can tell us. If you have the charmap utility running while WinWord
  is loaded, running, and then exited, you can observe that charmap's list
  of fonts originally does not include MS Dialog, then it appears
  after word is loaded, and disappears after Word is exited (or such
  is the case with Word2.0).
    WordPerfect for Windows version 5.2 and 6.0 *do* use these fonts in
  dialog boxes, so you can actually see the correct indic characters
  as you type in your search request.  Many other applications will
  do so also.  
    I am making these fonts available so that those with a bent toward 
  experimentation can try them out, tell me what works and what doesn't
  and perhaps eventually determine whether it would be worth the not
  inconsiderable effort that would be required to fine tune the bitmaps.

  c) The sserife.fon and sseriff.fon bitmap files are based on a new
  truetype font with the same character set as the HACC Indic family
  [which I will hereafter refer to as winindic].  Shakuntala (in file
  sakuntal.ttf) is a sans serif font based on Nimbus Sans L; it has been
  posted for ftp.  It may be used freely subject to conditions of the FSF
  General Public License: see the UPDATES file for details.

cheers,
Tom