[XeTeX] Beginner Devanagari question

[Daniel Stender]

Tobi Kellner wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I hope you had peaceful and relaxing Pentecost holidays!!
> 
> I'm
> jumping in at the deep end, starting with LaTex and XeLaTex all at the
> same time, for my M.Sc. thesis in Computational Linguistics (on machine
> transliteration).
> 
> The text will be mostly in English, with a few Hindi, Arabic and Katakana (Japanese) examples sprinkled around.
> 
> I enter/copy my Hindi/Arabic/Katakana directly, so I am not interested in Romanized/transliterated input.
> 
> I'm trying to create a simple "नमस्ते World" document, i.e. an example for Devanagari and English in the same text.
> 
> However, while "नमस्ते" (namaste) renders correctly in every piece of (Unicode-ready) software on my Windows XP system, including my TexMaker editor, the XeLaTex output PDF gets the
> s-t ligature wrong - I get a full s, with the halant(??)-line at the
> bottom, and a full t (excuse my lack of terminology!).
> 
> My XeLaTex code is
> 
> \documentclass{article} 
> \usepackage{fontspec}
> \begin{document}
> \newfontinstance{\devfont}{Mangal}
> \newenvironment{hindi}{\devfont}{}
> \begin{hindi}नमस्ते   \end{hindi} World!
> \end{document}
> 
> I would be extremely grateful if anyone could tell me what I'm doing wrong!
> 
> 
> Thank you so much for your help, it comes at a crucial time...
> Greetings from Bavaria,
> 
> Tobi

Hi Tobias,

I've had the same problem, try:
\newfontinstance{\devfont}[Script=Devanagari]{Mangal}

you might consider what's here, too:
http://granthinam.blogspot.com/2008/03/big-easy-integrated-devangar.html

Greetings,
Daniel Stender