Devanagari

[John Huntington]

Valerie's message leads me to what is probably a rash move.

However several years ago (maybe ten), I had a then new graduate
student who was struggling with transcribing Newar ligatures for
Sanskrit into Romanization.  I wrote for her use a simple Mac font
with most of the half letters and so on. We then had material that we
both could read and worked on the transliteration together. However,
it was based on a rather elegant Devanagari calligraphy book (Which I
cannot tell you the name of because I have given it to my son to work
with for a Hindi project). The font look rather nice as the original
glyphs were done in illustrator and then coded into a font in
Fontmaker.  It does not follow any formal keyboard system but was
based on the same key calls as SAsiadiacritic which I also produced
and which I understand has found fairly wide spread Mac usage.

If any of you want to try the font, please send me a message with
your e-mail address in it, I will send you a copy of the font and the
coding sheet for the key calls. Warning not all of the subscribed,
and superscribed aspects of a  ligature show up well on the screen,
but they print very well on a postscript (or emulator) printer.

If you find any missing components, please let me know and I see what
I can do about adding them over the winter holidays (If I stay in
Columbus)

John


>I have been following the correspondence about Devanagari with
>interest and increasing frustration.   Isn't there anyone else who,
>like me, just wants a Mac font (or set of fonts) with all the
>ligatures for correct Sanskrit?
>
>I don't see why I should have to buy OS X (and probably a new
>computer to run it on) just to try what sounds like yet another Hindi
>font.  I'm not bothered about Unicode, cross-platform compatibility
>and all the rest of it, so long as I can print out Sanskrit teaching
>materials with accuracy.    (Vedic accent marks would be nice, but I
>can manage without them.)
>
>At least one good Sanskrit (free) font has been available for PC for
>at least 10 years now.  Why is there apparently nothing for Mac,
>apart from the very expensive commercial ones?
>
>Valerie J Roebuck
>Manchester, UK
>
>
>At 7:12 pm -0800 11/11/04, Stefan Baums wrote:
>
>>the Unicode text only specifies the basic letters.  The number of
>>conjuncts used in displaying the text is entirely up to the font.
>
>.....
>
>>Most of the Unicode Devanagari fonts currently available cater to
>>the modern languages and lack some of the conjuncts that we would
>>like to have for Sanskrit.
>...