Hindi on Computers

You may find this useful if you are on wondows and want hindi support. Again there are lot of resources on net that tell you how to view/input hindi. right now, i am just limiting myself to BBC hindi page,hence forth refered to as the BHP :o). I got my information from www.alanwood.net and www.nepali.info. bottom line is ,install regional language /complex scripts support. google for windows xp internationalization, complex scripts,devanagri etc etc. installing complex script support is breeze. takes around 5 minutes but you have to restart your machine at the end. Then you configure firefox to use devanagri. (I will post my firefox settings tomorrow) so again if you have a windows xp CD ready , the process is more or less painless. The process should be similar for all windows2000+ systems.

Now that i can view hindi pages on my m/c it is time to dig a little deeper and try to understand how this is made possible. what kind of application can do this and what support they expect from the underlying system. what is the meaning of phrases like mac os x is hindi-ready. all the different types of fonts true type ,open type and how fonts provide hints to applications that do the rendering.in other words let me understand the process of converting bits packed in some scheme (encoding) as pixels arranged as letters on screen. what all is involved.