IndUni fonts

June 2007: at the request of Linotype, I have rebuilt the IndUni fonts under new names, to avoid clashes with names on which Linotype hold a trademark. The fonts that used to be called Courier IndUni are now called IndUni-C; those that used to be called Helvetica IndUni are now called IndUni-H; those that used to be called NCS IndUni are now called IndUni-N; those that used to be called Palatino IndUni are now called IndUni-P; those that used to be called Times IndUni are now called IndUni-T.

These fonts are designed to allow the representation of Indian-language (and similar) material in Roman script using the Unicode character set. They are based on fonts designed by

and made available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, a copy of which is included in the font zipfiles themselves in the file COPYING. The chief provisions of the GPL are that software licensed under it may be freely redistributed provided the author's copyright is properly acknowledged. As permitted under Section 2 of the GPL, I have modified the fonts to implement the accented characters needed by Indologists and other such scholars, using mkt1font, a program I wrote to create arbitrarily accented Type 1 PostScript fonts. The fonts output by mkt1font were converted to OpenType using Adobe's program MakeOTF (part of their OpenType Font Development Kit). The modified fonts, like the originals, are distributed under the GPL. However, the copyright remains with URW++ Design and Development Incorporated. The modified fonts were created on June 22, 2007.

The fonts work well under Windows XP, provided that Service Pack 2 has been installed and "complex scripts" enabled. They work well with Word 2003 and later. I have used them myself under Linux and Mac OS X Tiger. Conversion to Mac format was done with George Williams's program FontForge.

To enable complex scripts, Windows users should open the Start menu and choose "Control panel", then "Date, time, language, and regional options", then "Add other languages". Now check the box marked "Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages", and then click "OK".

Fonts for Windows and Linux users are contained in the five .zip files:

IndUni-C.zip contains fonts based on URW++'s Courier-lookalike;
IndUni-H.zip contains fonts based on URW++'s Helvetica-lookalike;
IndUni-N.zip contains fonts based on URW++'s New Century Schoolbook-lookalike;
IndUni-P.zip contains fonts based on URW++'s Palatino-lookalike;
IndUni-T.zip contains fonts based on URW++'s Times-lookalike;

Fonts for use with Mac OS X are contained in these similarly named files:

IndUni-C.dfont;
IndUni-H.dfont;
IndUni-N.dfont;
IndUni-P.dfont;
IndUni-T.dfont;

In addition, the file IndUni-CMono.zip contains Windows/Linux versions of Courier-like fonts that are monospaced (this can only be achieved by omitting the double-width characters kh-underbar, Kh-underbar and KH-underbar); the file IndUni-CMono.dfont contains the same fonts for Mac OS X. These fonts may be found useful with programs such as terminal emulators that require fixed-pitch fonts.

The file IndUni_Win_keyboard.zip contains a Windows keyboard layout that gives access to the special characters from the keyboard; the file IndUni_Mac_keyboard.zip contains the equivalent for Mac OS X. Note that on both systems Word follows the usual Microsoft-knows-best rule and ignores most of the keystrokes defined in these layouts. Within Word it is best to use the accent macros available here; it is easy to assign your own keystrokes to these. (The same collection of macros contains methods to permit the conversion of Word documents using the old Norman and CSX+ encodings to Unicode.)

Many people may find OpenOffice.org or its Mac OS X port NeoOffice preferable to Word and the other Microsoft Office components. Both are freeware, both support Microsoft's file formats, and both work well.

The file IndUni.def contains a list of the special characters contained in the fonts.

Please email any problems to jds10@cam.ac.uk.