Devanagari

[Kengo Harimoto]

> 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