alternatives to balaram -

What alternatives are there to Balaram: Ones that use the same encoding that are freely available. Please upload them here with screenshots please

Michael Best (Murai das?) has several Balaram incoding compatable fonts on his website. There are samples there so I'm not going to post them. He has covered most major font families with his work.

ScaGoudy is my personal favorite.

Michael Best (Murai das?) has several Balaram incoding compatable fonts on his website. There are samples there so I'm not going to post them. He has covered most major font families with his work.

ScaGoudy is my personal favorite. Ive attached a file with it zipped up. I dont happen to have photoshop on this laptop, or I would post a screenshot.

"Abandon all varieties of encoding and surrender unto Unicode"

I am a great believer in standards. So for diacritics please follow the International Standards Organization ISO 15919 standards for transliterating Indian Scripts into Roman see

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/stone-catend/trind.htm

My favorite font right now for diacritics is Gandhari Unicode available from Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project at Washington Univesity aailable at

http://depts.washington.edu/ebmp/software.php

They also have Unicode fonts for Devanagari and Bengali scripts.

If you want to still use the keystrokes of Balaram or whatever you are comfortable with then just make a keyboard layout yourself that will give you the same Unicode letters. Then not only do you NOT have to re-learn the keyboard but you also get the advantage of using Unicode which is fast becoming the Universal Standard. The best of both worlds.

I too am convinced that UNICODE is the way forward. By way of context, I was in fact laboriously reformatting Advaitadas ji's PDF of prembhakti chandrika into an A5 landscape document which would sit nicely on my harmonium and allowed more space for annotations.

I'm currently using windows ME and Word 97. I'm tied to Word cos for the moment my beautiful beautiful pre-unicode Bangla font only works within word and I really don't want the hassle of changing and typing everything in again but change I surely shall, Gradually. At this point I shall work towards the following scenario:


My vision for creating beautiful documents includes storing the original text in some kind of database table probably in HK then translates them into unicode devanagari/bangla and then formats them into beautiful DTP documents with beautiful page breaks and only requiring minimal tweaking and proof-reading. Probably using Adobe InDesign and its JavaScript facility but I'm open to other alternatives, possibly Scribus on LINUX but that'll have to wait for a new computer.