Fonts help!

If it's installed and showing in your Font Book you should have access to it from within any application. Have you tried installing other fonts to see if they show up?

2. How do I get "Devnagri" to work with MSword ?

MS Word for Mac does not support Devanagari (or any Indic language).

You will need to use another app, like TextEdit, Pages, OpenOffice, Nisus Writer.

You do not need to download any fonts -- there is only one that works and it is already on your machine (Devanagari MT).

But don't work in TextEdit

In order to type in Devanagari in TextEdit (or any app) you must first go to system preferences/language & text/input sources and check the box for the Devanagari keyboard layout (plus the box for Show Input Menu in Finder). Then you go to the "flag" menu at the top right of the Finder and select Devanagari. Then type.

Really surprised that other Hindi fonts aren't useable on Mac.

Mac and Windows use different technologies for complex scripts like Hindi. Windows Hindi fonts can be used with OpenOffice 2/X11 (that's an older version of OpenOffice 3) plus I think some of the most recent Adobe apps.

http://www.thomasphinney.com/2009/01/adobe-world-ready-composer/

Another option for using Windows fonts is via Linux, which is easy to add to OS X:

http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/2009/12/using-linux-for-language-input.html

In TextEdit I am able to see the Hindi language text converted to Roman(Default font).

Do you mean you are not actually seeing Devanagari script but Latin instead? If so, you could have an encoding problem (OS X only does Unicode Hindi). No easy font change can fix that.

Try opening the doc with OpenOffice, which is a free word clone.

If you like, send me a copy of your doc (tom at bluesky dot org) and I will see if I can figure out the problem.

Yes I am seeing Latin instead. I can select other fonts but with Devangari nothing happens. What does 'encoding problem' mean? Is it my machine or is it the source?

If you do not see Devanagari when you have selected the text and switched the font in TextEdit or OpenOffice to the Devanagari MT provided with OS X, then your source could be some non-standard legacy encoding.

In any case, it is hard to tell what the problem might be without seeing the file.

PS It looks like the Shusha font is totally non-standard, it maps Devanagari to Latin. You can download it from various places like here:

http://www.abhivyakti-hindi.org/abhi/hindishusha_fonts_dlhelp.htm

and put it in your Home/Library/Fonts and see if it works with your document. It might or it might not work with OS X or MS Word or TextEdit or OpenOffice. The encoding standard expected by all modern machines and apps is Unicode, where no other script is mapped to Latin and you do not need to install custom fonts.

Susha installed and it works just fine with MS Word and TextEdit.

Good news!

If at all possible I would recommend moving whatever work you are doing in that custom encoding to Unicode instead, to avoid it becoming unreadable sometime in the future.