Devanagari [the typsetting and printing of]

[Richard MAHONEY]

Dear Colleagues,

On Sun, Oct 31, 2004 at 10:04:37AM -0600, Matthew Kapstein wrote:

> What is the current wisdom regarding unicode devanagari fonts and
> methods of input? For one who wants something easy to install and to
> use, that produces an attractive result when printed with a
            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> reasonably high quality printer, what is most recommended?
>
> Is there, by the way, a keyboard compatible with the devanagari
> that is included in the Titus font set?
>
> Matthew Kapstein

I have been following this thread with interest but am returning to
Matthew's question about printing. When it comes to all discussions
about fonts and encodings and so on, the quality of printed output is,
for me, the central issue. So I'd like to say that although I find
unicode fonts useful on web pages, I find them irrelevant to
typography. At the moment, I am most interested in typesetting a
critical edition in Roman (Venetian), Devanagari and Tibetan. In this
work, unicode encodings, fonts, and input methods are no help at
all. And, at this point, I can not see how they could be. To my
knowledge, there are no unicode compliant typesetting systems
currently available that are capable of producing high quality
multilingual critical editions. What to do then if one desires high
quality Devanagari (or Tibetan) output?  One could use `LaTeX' with
`Devanagari for TeX' (or `cTibTeX'). If writing a critical edition
then perhaps `e-TeX' and `EDMAC' would give one greater flexibility
and control.


Best regards,

 Richard Mahoney


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Richard MAHONEY | internet: homepages.comnet.net.nz/~r-mahoney
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