As many of us MAC-people know, all this can be accomplished easily on MACs by using the keyboard "Devanarati - QWERTY". Unfortunately, this does not work well with MS Word, which does not support Unicode well (at least on MACs). I use Pages from Apple, and all the conjuncts come out well. You simply type as you would in transliteration, but for conducts you have to type the first letter then "F" (the Halant key) and the the second key, and magically the conjunct appears. I have been able to all this well only with the Unicode Font Tacoma. I would like to know the experience of others with other fonts. Sometimes to get unusual conjuncts, you have to go to Fonts (under Format), select All Fonts; and then at the bottom press the button with a gear symbol and invoke "Typography" - and there you see a button for "Rare Ligatures". But some difficult fonts I find can be done only in "TextEdit" -- and I am able then to simply copy and paste. I found the following instructions useful.

To generate default conjuncts, type the first character followed by the Halant (also called Virama) key, then the next character. To generate explicit half-forms for alternative conjuncts, or independent half-forms, type the character followed by the Halant key and the Nukta key. To generate an "eyelash RA," type RA plus Nukta plus Halant. To generate a Nukta consonant, type the character plus Nukta. To prevent conjuncts, type two Halants.

Note that the Halant/Virama key is the D key on Devanagari keyboards and the F key on Devanagari-QWERTY keyboards. The Nukta key is the ] key on Devanagari keyboards and the Shift-F key on Devanagari-QWERTY keyboards. RA is the J key on Devanagari keyboards and the R key on Devanagari-QWERTY keyboards.

To make special conjuncts used in Sanskrit, try selecting the font Devanagari MT in the Font Panel, going to Advanced (gear wheel) > Typography, and checking the box for Additional Conjuncts.

On Jun 17, 2012, at 2:34 AM, Artur Karp wrote:

Dear All,

The problem is already solved. A friendly and kind advice (or 'hitopadeśa') from Dr. Viacheslav Zaytsev from the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg.

To whom my special thanks.

In fact a simple operation. To produce, say, ndrya: from the symbols table of, say, Arial Unicode, select न, add virama, add द, add virama, add र, add virama, add य:

[na + virama - n + da - nda + virama - nd + ra - ndra + virama - ndr + ya = ndrya]

न - न् - न्द - न्द् - न्द्र - न्द्र् - न्द्र्य

द्द ष्ट्र ह्म

The same rule goes for santipur OT, bengali fonts, like shonar.ttf or vrinda.ttf, etc.

Best,

Artur Karp

Senior Lecturer in Sanskrit and Pali (ret.)
South Asian Studies Dept.
Oriental Faculty
University of Warsaw