You are welcome to email Phil Thompson with questions on Pali fonts – PC platform only.

Initially these fonts were converted by Chandra Yenco to a modified CSX character position in a Type 1 font format many years ago. Sadly Chandra has died, however his excellent Type 1 fonts have been converted to the new format in order to continue his good work.

Another zip file”unicode_explain.zip” has 3 PDFs and an DOC file (from which one of the PDFs has been made) that will explain about the new Unicode character positions. The DOC file could be used with different examples of Chandra’s Unicode fonts or other Unicode fonts (with Pali characters) to see how they look.

This new Unicode format allows Chandra’s fonts to be used with any other Unicode font (to be practical, provided the other fonts also have Pali characters in Unicode positions – not all Unicode fonts have all the 64,000+ Unicode characters in them). At this time there is limited usefulness for Unicode as only a few Word Processing / DTP programs and Operating Systems allow the use of Unicode characters. For example Microsoft Word 2000 and above make it easy to use Unicode. Characters can be inserted by means of the “Insert > Symbol” dialog. However the Operating System must be Windows 2000 or above.

Adobe InDesign is also able to use Unicode characters, along with WordPad and NotePad (in Windows 2000 and above). More information about Pali / Sanskrit Unicode fonts and the fonts themselves -plus more information – may be found at Pali Font Resources below:

• https://www.aimwell.org/Fonts/fonts.html (Ven Pesala has explanatory information about Pali fonts).
• www.sanskritweb.de/ (mixed Pali and Sanskrit fonts available)
• www.sil.org/~gaultney/gentium/download.html
• cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~luc/indic.html
• www.unicode.org