देवनागरी rendering in Mac-Excel

[सीताराम]

Namaste All,
I know this is not directly related to Sanskrit but it is driving me crazy, so thought to ask here for some help.

I am attaching a screenshot of devanagari text typed in Mac-Excel and Mac-notepad.

First line text typed in Mac-Excel

Second line typed in Mac-Notepad.

For some reason excel does not render half letters correctly, has anybody saw this issues on their Mac-Excel. I hate to type first in Notepad and then copy into excel.

People sharing their windows experience is not going to help because I do not have a windows machine.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

--
धन्यवाद: - राम 

[Shrivathsa B]

hariH OM,

   the same used to happen in windows xp machines if "international language support" weren't enabled in it. but that is history as far as windows is concerned. I am sure that if you port the excel file to any open format and open it in another machine having windows, it will work well. It is just that the software part which makes "dya" appear as dya is absent and hence it appears as half da and ya separate.

   If my xp experience is anything to go by, you can continue typing that without any fear of loss of information and use the final file in a different machine (having gnu or ubuntu). This is the big price to pay to be in such closed propreitary environments... in any case, you should send a request to the creators of mac-excel to improve their software to render indic scripts correctly.

svasti,

           JAYA BHAVAANII BHAARATII,

                                                             shrivathsa.

2013/9/8 सीताराम <raam...@gmail.com>

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[Nityanand Misra]

On Sunday, September 8, 2013 8:00:30 PM UTC+8, Raama wrote:

Namaste All,
I know this is not directly related to Sanskrit but it is driving me crazy, so thought to ask here for some help.

I am attaching a screenshot of devanagari text typed in Mac-Excel and Mac-notepad.

First line text typed in Mac-Excel

Second line typed in Mac-Notepad.

For some reason excel does not render half letters correctly, has anybody saw this issues on their Mac-Excel. I hate to type first in Notepad and then copy into excel.

Sri Rama Ji

How are you keying in (typing) the characters? 

If I understood you correctly, when you type into Mac-Notepad and copy-paste from Mac-Notepad to Mac-Excel, the result is fine. If that is the case, my diagnosis is that Mac-Excel is not be able to process the typed Devanagari "combining characters". For example a "laghu i maatra" typed after a consonant must be combined to the left of the consonant, not to the right as seen in your snapshot. 

I have no way to check as I do not use a Mac. However, to be sure, you can try this - go to this weblink http://rishida.net/tools/conversion/ - it is a Unicode <-> Hex conversion utility. Copy and paste the words typed in both Mac-Notepad and Mac-Excel, one by one, into the Mixed Input box and click on convert. Then see the Unicode U+hex notation output (it should be something like U+0930 U+093E U+092E for राम). Then share the output of both here. 

I suspect the hex output may be different for the same keystrokes typed into Mac-Notepad and Mac-Excel. If that is the case, it is a bug with Mac-Excel.

Thanks, Nityanand

[Daiva Jnanam]

Namaste -

Excel for Mac does not support UTF-8: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2011-macexcel/mac-excel-converts-utf-8-characters-to-underlines/7c4cdaa7-bfa3-41a2-8482-554ae235227b?msgId=c8295574-a053-48a6-b419-51523ce2a247
You can either use Google Docs or Apple's own Numbers.

[Anunad Singh]

As I understand, it is a problem of rendering and not the error in basic code of the text. The problem has been experienced with various combination of OS and application programs on various indian scripts. The charecteristic symptom is hraswa i_kaar maatraa and the sanyuktaaxaraas. For example, on windows, rendering of Devanagari used to have this problem in Firefox while it was OK in IE. Later, Firefox solved this problem. A second interesting case--> I am using XP. On Hindi wiki and other sites, rendering is flawless but if I go to bengali wiki and change the script from bangla to Devanagari (using FoxRplace, a Firefox add-on), I experience the same problem as experienced by Dr Ram. I know that this code is correct because if I copy the same text and paste it elsewhere, it looks fine.

Now the SOLUTION: On Bengali wikipedia, I have a very small bookmarklet which when clicked, makes the text look fine, but by corrupting the code internaly. Similar thing can be done on Mac-exel using a MACRO. But this should be used for reading the text only, not saving the taxt in this form. This is what we call a jugaaDa or kaamachalaa_oo solution (temp fix).  For permanent solution, it should be taken care of at the application level or OS level.

A similar problem is faced on Scribus, the famous opensource DTP software. I propose to use a macro (or script) as a gateway for this problem. The code of the bookmarklet/macro/script is small and simple.

-- अनुनाद सिंह

2013/9/10 Nityanand Misra <nmi...@gmail.com>

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On Sunday, September 8, 2013 8:00:30 PM UTC+8, Raama wrote:

Namaste All,
I know this is not directly related to Sanskrit but it is driving me crazy, so thought to ask here for some help.

I am attaching a screenshot of devanagari text typed in Mac-Excel and Mac-notepad.

First line text typed in Mac-Excel

Second line typed in Mac-Notepad.

For some reason excel does not render half letters correctly, has anybody saw this issues on their Mac-Excel. I hate to type first in Notepad and then copy into excel.

Sri Rama Ji

How are you keying in (typing) the characters? 

If I understood you correctly, when you type into Mac-Notepad and copy-paste from Mac-Notepad to Mac-Excel, the result is fine. If that is the case, my diagnosis is that Mac-Excel is not be able to process the typed Devanagari "combining characters". For example a "laghu i maatra" typed after a consonant must be combined to the left of the consonant, not to the right as seen in your snapshot. 

I have no way to check as I do not use a Mac. However, to be sure, you can try this - go to this weblink http://rishida.net/tools/conversion/ - it is a Unicode <-> Hex conversion utility. Copy and paste the words typed in both Mac-Notepad and Mac-Excel, one by one, into the Mixed Input box and click on convert. Then see the Unicode U+hex notation output (it should be something like U+0930 U+093E U+092E for राम). Then share the output of both here. 

I suspect the hex output may be different for the same keystrokes typed into Mac-Notepad and Mac-Excel. If that is the case, it is a bug with Mac-Excel.

Thanks, Nityanand

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अपनी यह हिंदी ही काम आई है।
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अन्ना तक सबने हिंदी ही अपनाई है।

[Ambarish Sridharanarayanan]

I'm afraid this is not going to help, but I can tell you why this happens. OSX provides two ways for programmers to write software on it (in software terms, two "API sets"), the old, Carbon, and the new, Cocoa. Carbon does not support correct rendering of Devanagari, and never will. Cocoa has been there for more than 10 years now, and has supported correct Devanagari text rendering for most of that time.

Unfortunately, most of Microsoft office still uses Carbon. Microsoft has committed to moving the software to Cocoa, and in Office for Mac 2011, Outlook already uses Cocoa and thus renders Devanagari correctly. I don't know when Microsoft will finally release an Excel written on Cocoa, but I speculate that'll be within 3 years.

[Vinodh Rajan]

Hi,

Mac Office supports only Opentype fonts. The default AAT fonts provided by OSX won't work in Mac office.

You have to install an OT Devanagari font like Mangal, Arial Unicode MS and then use that particular font for Devanagari display.

Cheers,

V

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[Adolf von Württemberg]

नमस्ते –

That seems to be good advice but Microsoft does not recommend using the Mangal font. I consulted with four of their South Asian language developers about five years ago and here is their advice re Mangal:

, Mangal remains the User Interface font because it was designed with the objective of displaying Devanagari clearly at small point sizes within the confines of the text fields for folder names, message boxes, and other features of the system. Modulated fonts such as the Devanagari range in Arial Unicode don’t work as well at the small point sizes required by the User Interface. This is because most screens have only a limited number of pixels at these sizes and so the subtleties of the modulation get lost or blurred.

Given this objective for Mangal, it is clear that it is not a ‘document font’ and was never intended to be beautiful for laying out pages of text for printing books etc. Fortunately, thanks to my colleagues in the Typography team we now have two document fonts for Devanagari: Kokila and Utsaah. Please check out these fonts, I think you will be pleased with them. There is also a display font, Aparajita, which is an elegant typeface for text headers and posters.

 

For a variety of reasons development of Arial Unicode has been discontinued. Note that Arial Unicode is an MS Office font not a Windows font.

 

My advice, if it works on a Mac (I am a 100% Windows guy), is to use the Chandas font developed by Mihail Bayaryn. To me it is aesthetically the most beautiful देवनागरी font ever developed; it does a superb job of displaying ‘stacked’ consonant clusters. Here is a link with a description wherein you will find the download link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandas_(typeface)

 

विष्णुः शास्त्री

 

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