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