Sanskrit on Mac (Cut & Paste)

Factual Questions
1

I’m working with an Indian woman on a DVD cover design. She decided to make the copy in Sanskrit and emailed me the text.

The Sanskrit shows up fine in Mail (the Mac email program) but when I try to copy and paste it into PhotoShop, InDesign or Illustrator it comes out as blank spaces. Or question marks. Or else only a few English numerals show up.

Mail says the font is Verdana (a common font used by Microsoft programs).

I’ve loaded a Sanskrit font and if I set my keyboard option to “Devanagari” can type Sanskrit characters with it in Illustrator (and probably my other programs.) But that font won’t change her text from question marks to Sanskrit.

I might be able to recreate it with my Sanskrit font but it looks like that would be hard to do. Any ideas?

2

Verdana is not a devanagari (i.e., Sanskrit script) font, so she’s not sending you Sanskrit text in Verdana (you probably know that but it wasn’t entirely clear).

It may just be that your Mail program recognizes Unicode characters but your other applications do not.

This discussion suggests that Photoshop (at least in some incarnations) indeed won’t let you copy-paste Unicode characters into a text layer. The respondents there advise using something called charmap, but it seems to be in a Windows context, not a Mac.

They say you can do something like charmap with the Mac Character Palette (alt/option-command-t), but I haven’t tried it.

3

You can have a font that has english characters in it and also characters in another language. Maybe you mean that you know for sure that Verdana on the Mac doesn’t have devanagari characters (I’m not on my Mac right now so can’t check, but on my Windows XP PC I see that Verdana doesn’t include any foreign language characters) but some other font could, without being a devanagari specific font.
For example, this font has characters for many different languages.

4

This software would probably solve your problem but it’s a bit pricy for one use:

http://www.modular-infotech.com/html/maclipi.html

5

Thanks Kimstu, Arnold, xash.

I just got home and haven’t checked out the links yet. It’s probably a uni-code issue, but unfortunately I barely know what that means.

I assumed it was Verdana, because that’s what Mail said it was, and when I switched to a different font the Sanskrit characters would change slightly. However, further experimentation showed that only the weights and spacing were changing… selecting Times Bold Italic would make the characters boldface italic.

This is not as easy as I’d hoped.

6

Baal Houtham, it sounds like you are working on Mac OS X since you are using Mail. Is the lady that sent you the Sanskrit text also working on Mac OS X? If she is then that removes one layer of complication. If she isn’t, it seems to me that it shouldn’t matter because you can see the indian characters in your e-mail.

Here are some of the issues that can happen.
Some representations will display foreign language characters using Unicode. So for example a lowercase greek alpha will be internally the hexadecimal digits 03B1. Any font that has Unicode greek characters will display the greek characters correctly regardless of the operating system as long as you are using a program that understands Unicode (most programs do nowadays.) This means that you can change to any Unicode font that includes greek characters. On the other hand, it is not easy to type in the greek characters because no key on your keyboard is going to create character 03B1 - you have to press several keys using a method appropriate for your operating system.

On the other hand, there are fonts that display greek characters instead of the latin alphabet. For example, in the old days, the Symbol font would show a lowercase alpha when you typed in the letter “a” on your US keyboard. With this approach, the characters would change from greek to latin if you switched from the Symbol font to, say, Times. This is a pain, but on the other hand using a font like Symbol makes it easy to type in greek on a US keyboard, as long as you remember that a = alpha, b = beta etc.

I would be surprised that Adobe Photoshop , In Design or Illustrator would not understand Unicode. But you have to have a font that has the Devangari characters for the proper Unicode values, and then have her send you a Unicode document displaying the text she wants. The Sanskrit font you downloaded might be one that, instead of displaying an a, displays a sanskrit character, which means that if you take some english text and change to the Sanskrit font, you will see Sanskrit characters. But if that’s the case with the Sanskrit font you downloaded, then it probably won’t display Unicode text correctly.

I would try one of these approaches:

  1. Have the lady send you a text document, and the font she uses, assuming she knows how to send you a font file, and that the filetype of the font file works on her operating system and also on Macintosh OS X.
    OR
  2. Find a Sanskrit font that works on Macintosh OS X and her operating system. Both of you should download and use the same font. Tell her to create a document that displays correctly using that font, then have her send you a text file, and confirm that on your system it displays the same as what she sees. Use that font in Illustrator.
    OR
  3. Have her send you a Unicode text file that displays the right characters when used with a “Unicode” font. View the Unicode file with a font that you know for sure can display Sanskrit characters - for example the font I link to in my previous post (Code 2000). Use that Unicode font in Illustrator.

In either case, I would have her send you, along with the text, a screenshot of what it should look like. The screenshot, being an image, will always display correctly, so it gives you a reference point to avoid mistakes.