Installing Hindi on your PC



जय श्री राधे !
यह हिन्दी है ।

If you can read the above welcome message in Hindi, and the maatraas and conjuncts look right, then your computer is able to display Unicode Hindi properly. You can close this window.

If you cannot see the Hindi type or the words are not spelled correctly, please follow the instructions given below to install support for Hindi. Normally Windows includes support for Hindi but it may need to be installed which is quite easy and should take only a few seconds. The latest Mac computers should be able to see the Hindi as well.

Installing support for Hindi on your computer

Note: You must have IE - Internet Explorer (version 5.5 or above), or Netscape (version 4 or above) or latest versions of any of the other browsers like Opera, Mozilla FireFox, Safari, etc. which support Unicode fonts.

Please select your operating system, for the appropriate section :

Windows Vista

Complex text support is automatically enabled. You do not need to do anything to enable viewing of Indic text.

Windows XP and Server 2003

This is where we install Complex Scripts in Windows XP & 2003Complex text support needs to be manually enabled.

  1. Go to Start > Control Panel.
  2. If you are in "Category View" select the icon that says "Date, Time, Language and Regional Options" and then select "Regional and Language Options".
  3. If you are in Classic View select the icon that says "Regional and Language Options".
  4. Select the "Languages" tab and make sure you select the option saying "Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages (including Thai)". A confirmation message should now appear - press "OK" on this confirmation message.
  5. Allow the OS to install necessary files from the Windows XP CD and then reboot if prompted.
This is where we setup for Indic options for Windows 2000Windows 2000

Complex text support needs to be manually enabled.

  1. Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel > Regional Options > General [Tab].
  2. In the "Language settings for this system" frame, check the box next to "Indic".
  3. Copy the appropriate files from the Windows 2000 CD when prompted.
  4. If prompted, reboot your computer once the files have been installed.
Windows 95, 98, ME and NT

These operating systems contain no direct support for Indic scripts. Downloading Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher should enable you to view Indic scripts on these operating systems. If after downloading Internet Explorer, you still cannot view Indic scripts, please install an appropriate Hindi (Devanagari) Unicode font.

Mozilla Firefox does not support Indic scripts on these older operating systems unless a modified version of the program is used, such as the one found here.

Mac OS X

With OS X 10.2 or higher you may have to manually install the Indic package from the install CD. From one of the install CDs, open the packages named "AdditionalFonts.pkg" and "AdditionalAsianFonts.pkg" and run the installers.

As for web browsers, Safari, however, seems to render text better and more reliably than Firefox. IE Mac is out of the question.

Gnome

You do not need to do anything to enable viewing of Indic text in Gnome 2.8 or later. Older versions may have support for some, but not all Indic scripts. Ensure you have appropriate Unicode fonts for each script you wish to view or edit.

When using Mozilla or Firefox, you must enable Pango rendering by opening xterm and typing MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO=1 mozilla or MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO=1 firefox. After this, all future sessions of Mozilla or Firefox will have Indic language support. This will work only on Firefox compiled with ctl support. Only the firefox binaries supplied by Fedora Core 4 and Ubuntu Linux are compiled with this ctl and set this option, by default.

KDE

You do not need to do anything to enable viewing of Indic text. Ensure you have appropriate Unicode fonts for each script you wish to view or edit.

Debian Based GNU/Linux Distributions

Simply enter as root:

apt-get install ttf-indic-fonts

and when the installation is complete restart the X server.