Nakula and Sahadeva are “twin” Devanagari fonts, which have been developed by IMRC, India, for the University of Cambridge.
Both fonts are TrueType/OpenType, and are Unicode compliant. Both contain all the conjuncts and other ligatures (including Vedic accents) likely to be needed by Sanskritists. Nakula follows the Bombay style of Devanagari, with rounded glyphs and little thin/thick variation. Sahadeva is in the Calcutta style, with more angular glyphs and greater contrast between thin and thick strokes. The actual shapes of some of the glyphs (e.g. initial “a”, retroflex “n”) also differ according to the style of the font.
The fonts work well under Windows XP, provided that Service Pack 2 has been installed and “complex scripts” enabled. I have used them myself under Linux. They are not compatible with Tiger or with earlier releases of Mac OS X (except via special software such as XeTeX); that situation is likely to change with later releases of the OS.
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”.
These fonts are free software; you can redistribute them and/or modify them under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
These fonts are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
For the terms of the GNU General Public License, see the file COPYING.Please email any problems to John Smith: jds10 <at> cam.ac.uk