Charles Poncet wrote:

Works absolutely fine for me perhaps because I have both sans12.ttf font and Xdvng installed.
I wish TYPING in Devanagari was that simple because all available software seems to be unable to recognise that some people do not type on American or English language keyboards. I use a French keyboard and sure enough I have to guess where to find the anuswara and the like because all indications in the manual are wrong !! This is very frustrating indeed.
If anybody has a bright idea how to solve that problem I will be very grateful
Charles Poncet

Pardon me for repeating the following information.
But there are two existing solutions around this problem. One is to use the ITRANS scheme which uses ordinary transliterations for encoding the material. You don't need any fancy keystrokes. The Itranslator developed by the folks at the Omkarananda Ashram will open two windows, let you type ITRANS notation in one and see the output in another. Once created, the devnagari file is fully portable. The site for this public domain utility is:
Omkarananda Ashram
If you are more used to word-type processing, then I recommend the simple macros by John Richards also available in the same site. They don't need ITRANS scheme, but you can type transliterated letters followed by a control sequence to create ligatures. Both these solutions are for the Windows' world! For unix etc. the ITRANS or TeX/LaTeX are still my choices!

As a sample, let me illustrate how the sample

Ay< inj> praeveit g[na l"ucetsam!, 
  %darcirtana< tu vsuxEkk…quMbkm!.

is encoded in ITRANS. It is simply:
ayaM nijaH paroveti gaNanA laghuchetasAm |
udAracharitAnAM tu vasudhaikakuTumbakam ||