If you are seeing strange characters (often empty rectangles or bold vertical bars) when viewing pages in hindi, gujarati and urdu it is probably because you need to take some steps to enable your computer to display the correct font.

Hindi

To view pages in the Hindi section of the web site, it is recommended that users have Microsoft's Arial Unicode MS installed. Users of Microsoft Office 2000, Microsoft Office XP or Microsoft Publisher 2002 can install Arial Unicode MS as default. Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 users will need to install an alternative Hindi font such as Mangal.
Mangal is included with Windows XP but can also be downloaded from this website by right clicking here and selecting 'save target as'. Users may also need to change their browser encoding option to 'Unicode' for changes to take effect.

Gujarati

To view pages correctly in the Gujarati section of the web site, it is recommended that users have Microsoft's Arial Unicode MS installed. Users of Microsoft Office 2000, Microsoft Office XP or Microsoft Publisher 2002 can install Arial Unicode MS as default. Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 users will need to install an alternative Gujarati font such as Padmaa which is available from the fonts section (Available free open type fonts) on the Indictrans Project website. Users may also need to change their browser encoding option to 'Unicode' for changes to take effect.

Urdu

Pages in Urdu use Unicode UTF-8 throughout. To get characters to display correctly please check that you have Microsoft's Arial Unicode installed. This can be installed as default with the following products:

Microsoft Office XP, Microsoft Word 2002, Access 2000, Excel 2000, FrontPage 2000, Office 2000 Premium, Outlook 2000, PowerPoint 2000, Publisher 2000 and Word 2000.

Users may also need to change their browser encoding option to 'Unicode' for changes to take effect.

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A useful resource for Apple Macintosh users can be found at www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts_mac.html.