Hindi-English Font & Software

Smart Fonts come with logical tables, graphical data, and hinting instructions for letter forms. Thus, 'smart fonts' can be considered as 'type software'.

Akhilesh Gupta began developing font/s and related software for processing DevaNagari text in 1991. In 1995, we started selling these font/s and software for personal computers. Our software solution supports typesetting in Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, and other languages that use DevaNagari script, along with English (Roman letters).

Click here to get information about our font/s in Hindi.

Until 2005, there was little demand for our fonts due to various reasons. Now, some users are interested in our smart font called 'Akhil HE', but few are willing to pay for it. We plan to include support for other Indian scripts in our type software once we achieve profitability!

Typesetting Multilingual Text in Hindi (DevaNagari) & English (Latin)

The 'Nagari' (also known as 'Devanagari') script is used by millions to write Hindi, Nepali, Marathi, Sanskrit, and some dialects in India, Nepal, Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad, and Guyana. English is also widely used by many Indians. Therefore, we need computer types (fonts) and software that can accommodate, store, and display multilingual text.

Unicode for DevaNagari

Before Unicode was introduced, Indians had no choice but to use non-standard encodings since there was no practical standard for processing Indic scripts on computers.

While ISCII (Indian Script Code for Information Interchange) existed, no system vendor supported it! The advent of Unicode changed this; the Indic code charts of Unicode were derived from ISCII-88!

The scripts of the Indian subcontinent generally follow similar syllable formation rules. Many characters in these scripts correspond one-to-one! Thus, transliteration between various Indian scripts is relatively straightforward! The code points for characters in these scripts within Unicode (according to ISCII) are organized based on a common framework.

The priority should be enabling smart fonts effectively on older computers. Many Indians live below the poverty line, making it impractical for most organizations in India to continuously upgrade their systems!

Unicode compliant OpenType Fonts

Modern operating systems that support Unicode allow direct text entry in most scripts. These systems (like Windows 7 and 10) do not require additional software to enter and render text in most scripts. They come with numerous fonts. Some of these fonts (generally those with only European characters) are of high quality. But fonts of complex scripts (particularly Indic scripts) are just there to fulfill international requirements. So, for Hindi etc., we need additional DevaNagari OpenType font/s of acceptable quality. Then we can properly typeset Hindi text along with English directly even in plain and simple text editors like Notepad.

We have designed and programmed a cool OpenType smart font - 'Akhil HE'. This type-software contains a logical set of DevaNagari glyphs (we call 'Saral Nagari') along with ASCII characters (regular Roman alphabet etc.). It is an optimised, synchronised and professionally instructed (hinted) smart font. Its quality can be fully appreciated while typesetting multilingual text.

There are lots of advantages to using this smart font.

If you are an OS X user, please note that OT fonts for Indic scripts are not adequately supported on OS X. Therefore, OS X may not effectively use our font 'Akhil HE' to render Nagari text!

You can still use our keyboard layout on OS X.

Our Solutions for Windows 2000 to Windows 10

Previously, we developed a package named 'Sugam-98' which enabled easy entry of Unicode encoded Nagari in Windows 98.

For newer Windows operating systems such as Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, and 11 we offervarious versions of Sugam 2K.

Components of Sugam-2K include:

• The aforementioned OpenType font - Akhil HE
• A simple TrueType font - Akhil
• An enhanced keyboard layout - SuNāgarī

'Akhil HE' serves as the primary component of our software 'Sugam'. Other smaller components of Sugam are free for all customers. Therefore, purchasing 'Sugam' is essentially equivalent to acquiring 'Akhil HE'.

To read more about SuNāgarī click here.

To try / use SuNāgarī just type hindi.co/t in your browser or click here

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Indian Software - LeKhaNi

Our first software was called LeKhaNee (Lekhni - Windows 95). It used to render and record text in a non-standard encoding! Its last version was 2.1. Forthcoming Lekhanee 3.0 will be a Unicode based multilingual editor. For your present text editing, use the Writer (component of LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice). Use our font 'Akhil HE' in the Writer (or any other Windows or Linux based Word-processor) for ultimate satisfaction.

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