How do fonts work?Ī font serves the purpose of representing the regular characters with the one designed and crafted by its creator using font editing tools such as Fontographer (now replaced by Fontlab).įigure 1: Letter 'A' when typed in Monotype Corsiva (left) and Times New Roman (right) Fonts. The first version of Unicode was released in 1991 AD. It's large, consumes more storage space, but contains characters from all languages, including Nepali.

In an attempt to build a single encoding system, Unicode was born. The traditional rule-sets were compact, took less storage space, but were insufficient to hold characters of languages like Chinese and Japanese. Each encoding schemes were created for different languages and to meet the different kinds of need. Traditionally, the encoding schemes contained only 256 characters, and the world was overwhelmed by an enormous number of different encoding schemes. The characters are converted to binary numbers through a specific set of rules, known as encoding schemes. In computer systems, characters are converted to and stored as a set of binary bits: 0s and 1s. For the Nepali language, the available font choices are Non-Unicode fonts (Preeti, Kantipur, etc.) and the Unicode Fonts (Nirmala UI, Mangal, etc.). Picking the right font is confusing, especially for languages other than English. There are various kinds of fonts, and each font has a unique characteristic and purpose. Font helps to maintain the universality of how typefaces are represented on various digital platforms.

Difficulty to maintain universal search and multiplatform support.Ī font is a set of characters designed with the same size, pitch, and spacing.

It’s quite a tedious job to practice and remember the keyboard layout for Non-Unicode fonts, and it becomes infuriating when different fonts have different character mapping.Preeti and other Nepali fonts only work if the particular font is available to the computer system.Why not use Preeti or any other Non-Unicode Nepali font? Easier to learn and be accustomed to, as there is only one standard to deal with.Can be converted to and from any other encoding standard, as Unicode is the superset of all other common characters.Maintain support for all platforms from a single text encoder.

Unicode to preeti