Devanagari Unicode fonts for the Mac?

[Adheesh Sathaye]

I wonder if anyone has had any success with the newly released "World  
Ready Composer" plugin for CS4 (ME edition) on the Mac? Info about it  
is available here: http://www.thomasphinney.com/tag/world-ready-composer/ 
, which I discovered from an article on the reliable "Multilingual  
Mac" blog: http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/2009/02/adobe-app-language-improvements.html

I would be interested to know if anyone has had the opportunity to try  
out what might be a positive new development in this front?

Also, has anyone else noticed that Devanagari rendering appears to  
work in Powerpoint 2008 (for Mac) but not the rest of the Office 2008  
suite? Perhaps also a positive step from Microsoft?


All  best wishes,

Adheesh


----
Adheesh Sathaye
Department of Asian Studies
University of British Columbia

On May 13, 2009, at 10:56 AM, alessandro graheli wrote:

> Dear Paul,
>
> it seems an impossible task. InDesign, at least upto CS3, is known  
> for not providing support for Indic scripts. I’ve read there is some  
> plugin to use OpenType Devanagari fonts on Windows, but not for Mac.  
> On OSX there is an additional, mighty problem with Unicode  
> Devanagari: the otherwise excellent built-in engine which manages  
> ligatures and vowel-signs of Indic scripts works only with AAT  
> (Apple Advanced Typography) fonts, such as Devanagari Monotype which  
> comes with OSX. The Windows universe mostly uses OpenType Devanagari  
> fonts. To put it simply, unlike with Latin and other Unicode ranges,  
> when one tries to convert files from Windows to Mac or viceversa, he  
> will get a mess with ligatures and vowel-signs, because of the  
> different engines and because of the different intrinsic features of  
> the fonts.
>
> Specifically, Truetype fonts which run on Mac OSX, Devanagari MT  
> included, manage variants such as ligatures and old type numbers  
> through AAT (Advanced Apple Typography) tables, which need to be  
> read and applied by the software that uses the font, both in source  
> and output. InDesign will ignore some of these features and will  
> handle only the basic Unicode characters. Unicode charts, in fact,  
> prescribe only the encoding for the basic alphabetic characters,  
> while  variations of glyphs such as ligatures are handled by such  
> tables which lay deep in the font structure. A problem with AAT  
> tables is that there is hardly any documentation available and to  
> access them, not to speak of modifying them, so improving such fonts  
> seems rather problematic. Conversely native OSX software such as  
> TextEdit, for instance, handles all the AAT tables and thus renders  
> ligatures properly.
>
> Hope it helps,
>
> Alessandro Graheli
> Rome, Italy
>
> Il giorno 13/mag/09, alle ore 18:40, Paul G. Hackett ha scritto:
>
> Greetings,
>
> I am attempting to typeset some Unicode Devanagari text in Adobe  
> InDesign (CS3) on the Mac (OS X.5.6) but cannot seem to locate a  
> Unicode font that will function correctly (i.e. form ligatures) in  
> InDesign.  Does anyone know of any such font that will do so (free  
> or otherwise)?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Paul Hackett
> Columbia University
>