Hindi-English Font & Software

Smart Fonts include logical tables along with graphical data & hinting instructions for letter forms. So 'smart fonts' can be termed as 'type software'.

In 1991, Akhilesh Gupta started developing fonts and related software for processing DevaNagari text. We started selling these fonts & software for personal computers in 1995. This software solution was for typesetting Hindi, Marathi, Nepali (& other languages written using DevaNagari) along with English (Roman letters).

Link for reading this text in Hindi
Click here to get information about our font/s in Hindi.

There wasn't a real demand for our font/s for various reasons till 2005. Now some people want to have our smart font called 'Akhil HE', but few are willing to pay for it. We will be including support for other Indian scripts in our type software when we break even!

Typesetting MultiLingual text of
Hindi (DevaNagari) & English (Latin)

The 'Nagari' (aka 'Devanagari') script is used by millions for writing text of Hindi, Nepali, Marathi, Sanskrit and some dialects in Indiā, Nepāl, Māuritius, Fiji, Trinidād and Guyānā. English is also used by a lot of Indians. So we need computer types (fonts) and software that can allow, store and render (display) multilingual text.

Unicode for DevaNagari

Before Unicode, Indians had no option but to use non standard encodings as there was no practical standard for processing Indic scripts in computers.

Though there was ISCII (Indian Script Code for Information Interchange), but no system vendor supported it! Then came Unicode; Indic code charts of Unicode were taken from ISCII-88!

Most of the scripts of the Indian subcontinent largely follow similar rules for formation of syllables. Lots of characters in these scripts have one-to-one correspondence! So transliteration between various Indian scripts is not very difficult! Code points for the characters of these scripts in Unicode (as per ISCII) are arranged according to a common plan.

Enabling smart fonts properly in older computers should be a priority. Lots of Indians live below the poverty line and it is not feasible for most organisations in India to keep upgrading!

Unicode compliant OpenType Fonts

Modern operating systems which are Unicode based can directly let you enter text in most of the scripts. These operating systems (like Windows 7, 10) don't require additional software to enter and render text in most of the scripts. These operating systems have lots of 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, remember OT fonts for Indic scripts are not properly supported in OS X. So OS X cannot properly use our font 'Akhil HE' to render Nagari text!

Our keyboard layout can be used in OS X.

Our Solutions for Win 2000 to Win 10

In the past, we developed a package named 'Sugam-98' to enable easy entry of Unicode encoded Nagari in Windows 98.

For newer Windows OS like Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10 and 11 we have various versions of Sugam 2K.

Components of Sugam-2K:

  • Aforementioned OpenType font - Akhil HE
  • A simple TrueType font - Akhil
  • SuNāgarī (An Enhanced Keyboard Layout)

'Akhil HE' is the main component of our software 'Sugam'. Other small components of Sugam are free for all of our customers. So buying 'Sugam' is like buying 'Akhil HE'.

To read more about SuNāgarī click here.

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


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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Updated: Sep 23

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