THL Toolbox > Fonts & Related Issues > Nepali Fonts > Devanagari for Mac OS X
Devanagari Unicode Input for Mac OS X
In June 2009, 
Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya in Kathmandu, Nepal, has updated their 2004 Nepali Devanagari keyboard layout for Apple Mac OS X. To install the keyboard layout and icon, please follow these instructions, available from Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya:
- Download the file Romanized_Keyboard_Layout_For_Mac.zip and extract the two files "NepaliRomanized.1.keylayout" and "NepaliRomanized.1.icns" from the zip file.
- Quit all running applications.
- Go to the Macintosh HD (or whatever your system hard drive is named) and find the following folder path: System / Library / Keyboard Layouts.
- Drag the two files you extracted from the zip file into the Keyboard Layouts folder.
- You will see a dialogue box which reads: "the item…could not be moved because "Keyboard Layouts" cannot be modified", click Authenticate.
- You will need to be logged in as the administrator to have the permission to Authenticate.
- Restart the computer.
- Open TextEdit and change the keyboard layout to NepaliRomanized (either by using the Apple menu bar on the top right of the desktop or by opening System Preferences / International / Input Menu and selecting NepaliRomanized.
- You should be able to type in Nepali using a Romanized keyboard layout which can be viewed by clicking here.
You will need at least Mac OS X.2 (Jaguar) but preferably OS X.3 (Panther) to be able to view and input Devanagari Unicode on your computer.
You will also need to have the Asian language kit and fonts installed which came on the install discs for the operating system. We strongly recommend using the free OS X browser Safari rather than Internet Explorer. The former requires no special adjustment to view Unicode pages, while Internet Explorer is not smooth for Mac OSX.
To prepare your browser for Unicode, we strongly suggest that you read Alan Wood's excellent and helpful pages on this topic. Microsoft Office for Mac is still not fully Unicode compliant. Office for Mac 2004, which was released in May 2004, offers limited Unicode support but Devanagari half-characters do not render. Mellel, a cheap word processor for OS X, is pretty good on Unicode input, but Devanagari half-characters are not rendered correctly. The best bet is TextEdit 1.3, the free Unicode-compliant editor which comes embedded within Mac OS X.