A few months back I bought myself a macbook pro. Really i think it was a good decision. I am very happy with the quality of hardware and some of the cool features that Mac OS X Tiger offers. So today while I was browsing, I came across webdunia.com. It publishes it’s content in 9 different Indian languages including Hindi, my mother tounge. I was using Firefox 2.0.07 and all I could see on the site was images and ????. All the hindi text appeared as question marks. I immediately thought that hindi fonts are not installed. I decided to install the font set to see my favourite curvy characters. I search very hard on the internet, googling this afternoon to get Hindi working on my Mac. But to no avail.
After my evening tea I sat again and decided to give it another try. But this time to my surprise I could read everything without doing anything. I had no clue what was going on. Then I realised I was using Safari, the pre installed browser. After some more search on net I came to know that Indic rendering of Firefox on Mac OS X is not up to the mark yet, but is perfect on Safari.
To sum up:
On Safari with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger the handling of Indian scripts is amazingly flawless.
On Firefox unfortunately as of today Indian scripts can’t be rendered well enough.
If you wish to type in Hindi:
1) Go to System Preferences
2) Click on International
3) Click on the Input tab and select Devanagari and/or Devanagari-QWERTY
4) Check the Show Input Menu in Menu Bar for easy switching
And this is how to write word Hindi using hindi script
