

As of January 2003, thanks to an initiative of Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya in Kathmandu, a Nepali Unicode font package has been released. Click here to download the code chart for Devanagari from the Unicode website. Nepali is included in the Unicode standard, under Devanagari.

Unicode is an international organization that provides a standard encoding for all of the world's major languages. The ultimate solution to such problems has been the development of a Unicode Nepali font. Thankfully, however, most Nepali fonts are available for both of the major operating platforms, Windows and Mac OS, even though they remain difficult to use consistently in Internet browsers. Also, such fonts are for the most part developed by individuals, thus limiting their widespread use and dissemination. There are a variety of Nepali fonts available, but many of these are mutually incompatible due to different encodings (numeric codes that are mapped to character images or glyphs). To date, the use of Nepali Devanagari on computers has been limited by the lack of standard cross-platform fonts. In order to view or input the Devanagari script in a digital context, it is necessary to have a Devanagari font installed on one's computer or to have a Unicode enabled computer which has a keyboard driver for Indian (and preferably Nepali) input. Nepali Devanagari has 11 vowels and 33 consonants and is largely phonetic, which means that the pronunciation closely resembles the writing system. Nepali is written in the Devanagari (or 'Nagari' script), which is also used for Hindi, Marathi and Sanskrit.

The THL Toolbox > Fonts & Related Issues > Nepali Fonts
