Hindi on Computers

The goal was to see a nicely rendered BBC hindi site.
Finally after struggling with hindi fonts in safari for quite some time, today i am able to see how i wanted to see http://www.bbc.co.uk/hindi website. To view hindi you require two things, an application that understands unicode (able to interpret UTF-8 kind of encoding ) and good hindi fonts. The application is my web browser, safari on mac os X.
But fonts were an altogether different issue. after surfing internet i got this piece of information that I need to install additional language pack on mac os x ( I have panther 10.3.9) from install disc 2 to get the required hindi fonts. see simon brown's web log for more.
However when i popped in my install disc 2, it only showed an RTF file and i was really clueless as to where all the packages are gone. So i decided to copy hindi fonts from my window system or download them directly from internet.

There are many hindi fonts available on net. However There are certain factor that decide "what is a good hindi font" to have on your system. I tried Yogesh, Mangal from my winXP box , JanaHindi and Gargi to name a few . You should not take propriety fonts , I hate them. And never, never , never agree to download some stupid embedded fonts that work on just one web site. Again all the knowledge on net is in favour of taking an OpenType font. according to adobe's site , these fonts are cross platform and provide good hints to underlying system. I think JanaHindi and Mangal are opentype fonts. I am not sure about this, but will check and verify some day. I am also planning to gather information on the fonts mechanics and what goes under the hood when machines display letters in word processors and applications.

So I just copied /downloaded these hindi fonts to my /users/rjha94/library/fonts folder. Then i opened safari menu, clicked on preferences and then appearance tab. Click on select button to the right of fonts name being displayed. Your font book will open. Add a suitable hindi font to your Font Book and tell safari to use it. thats all you need to do. The process is explained in detail on alanwood.net unicode pages. (an excellent resource)
Time to reload BBC hindi page. Guess what! Now i can see Hindi but this is not the hindi i know. All the matras have gone for a toss and it does not looks good. No self respecting guy would call this hindi. what to do ? I showed the page to my mother and she said , " reading hindi on computer is very difficult ".
So i was stuck with bad fonts. Funny fact is the very same mangal font was rendering the same site on my win xp box quite nicely. I would like to investigate this issue some day. And then i realized my mistake. That i actually have an install DVD and *not* an install CD for mac os X. This article from apple shows how to install packages from install DVD

So the processof making hindi work for you on mac OS X is actually very simple.
only one step to do (and no step if it was done during mac os x installation time itself)
+ install additional languages package
+ open hindi site in safari.
Question is how does safari decide what fonts to pick for display ? suppose i have multiple hindi fonts installed on my system , how do i tell my browser to pick the righ one ? Righ now,i have just taken a short cut and deleted all hindi fonts but those installed by apple.

Finally a nicely rendered BBC hindi site :o)
why safari and why not firefox ? Can i view all the hindi websites today ? answers in the next blog.