Dear Devanagari and Adobe, Please make nice.

I am still hung up on the fonts issue for the Guatemala-Darjeeling postcard project. I guess the Devanagari alphabet and Adobe don’t get along too well. I have a Microsoft Word documents of the Spanish postcard text translated into Nepali.  The document was made in the program Shree Lipi.  It looks like garbly-gook on my computer. I need to make it legible and then put it into InDesign for layout. I am starting to send out letter like the one below. If you have any ideas, please let me know.

Hello,

I am working on a project that involves doing layout work on a Mac in Nepali. My colleague ********* thought that you could help. I don’t know how to get the fonts or how to make them work with Adobe software, if this is even possible.

The project involves postcard correspondences between a community of ex-guerrilla coffee farmers in Guatemala and a cooperative of Gorkha tea farmers in Darjeeling. Both communities are fair trade certified. I want to translate and print the postcards from the Guatemalans in booklets and distribute them to the Darjeeling farmers. Right now, my partner NGO in Darjeeling is completing the translation. I have a portion of it, and I’ve been trying to figure out how my designer is going to do the layout work on the booklets, but we can’t get the fonts to work. The translations were typed up in Shree Lipi. How do you do design work with languages in the Devanagari alphabet? Does all of India use Windows for this kind of work?

I have asked many people about how to make this work, and so far I have come up with no solutions. Do you have any ideas? If not, do you know someone who might? I am very excited about this project. I want to get it through the next stages in the coming months. This hang up is an unexpected drag on progress. Any input or assistance would be eagerly welcomed.

Many thanks,
Ida C. Benedetto