Devanagari Unicode fonts for the Mac?

[alessandro graheli]

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