Devanagari

[Dean Anderson]

Do the Mac font assignments match any of the ones in the PC/Linux world?
In other words, are we anywhere near having a good cross-platform layout
that we might turn into a standard among Indologists?

Dean Anderson

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Indology [mailto:INDOLOGY at liverpool.ac.uk] On Behalf Of
>Kengo Harimoto
>Sent: Sunday, October 31, 2004 5:45 PM
>To: INDOLOGY at liverpool.ac.uk
>Subject: Re: Devanagari
>
>
>> I am not aware of the situation with Devanagari input on
>Linux and Mac
>> systems.
>
>Mac OS X (since 10.0?) comes with Devanagari support.  One has
>to tell the installer to install Indic languages support upon
>fresh install, or run the System installer later telling it to
>install the support.
>
>Two Devanagri input methods come with the system: Devanagari
>QWERTY and Devanagari.  I assume the latter is in accordance
>with the ISCII keyboard layout.
>
>The Devanagari suport has been improving consistently.  The
>current version of the Mac OS X is 10.3.  I think it has come
>to the point of being usable by now.
>
>Most OpenType unicode fonts work to some degree.  It appears
>that Apple's OpenType support is not yet perfect.  For
>example, I don't see conjunct characters on screen.  (In
>utf-8, I understand that the input stream is something like ka
>+ viraama + ta for kta.  If a font has that conjunct
>character, it should appear as kta, but that's not the case
>with Devanagari OpenType unicode fonts on  OS X.  I see ka +
>viraama + ta on screen.)
>
>The Devanagari fonts provided by Apple (AAT font) better
>supports conjunct characters.  However, there are still some
>bugs and not all the ligatures that should be available in the
>font may not appear on screen.
>
>I might also add that keyboard layout presupposes Hindi rather
>than Sanskrit, so, some commonly used symbols are not easily
>available.  For example, long vocalic r was not accessible
>through standard keyboard layout (QWERTY version).  A slight
>modification to the keyboard layout was necessary.
>
>All the Cocoa applications, meaning applications that don't
>run on Classic Mac OS (<= Mac OS 9.x)[1], support utf-8,
>including Devanagari.
>
>[1] Things are much more complicated, but this is the best
>simplification I can make with regard to what Cocoa applications are.
>
>--
>kengo harimoto
>