Hindi on the computer

Most of what follows applies to all other Indic languages, though only for Windows XP.

Viewing Hindi on the web

Test website: hi.wikipedia.org/. If you open this in Internet Explorer, it should work fine and you should see all the characters correctly. If you do not then go to View→Encoding, and select Unicode (UTF-8). The trick is to make it work properly in Netscape or Firefox. First make sure the encoding is set to Unicode: go to View→Character Coding, and select Unicode (UTF-8). The usual problems with these browsers is that the ligatures (e.g. ि) and complex consonants (म्त) do not show up properly. Do the following to fix this:
  • Go to Control Panel→Regional and Language Options.
  • Click on the Languages tab and check the box for "Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages".
  • Click OK and let the computer restart if it wants to.

Typing in Hindi

First of all you need a Devanagari font. You should already be having one with Windows XP: open Notepad and check if you have the Mangal font in the list of fonts. If you do not, or if you want another font, you can download them from David McCreedy's Gallery. Now, do the following:
  • Go to Control Panel→Regional and Language Options.
  • Click on the Languages tab and then click on the Detail... button. This brings up the Text Services and Input Languages window.
  • Click the Add... button to bring up the Add Input Language dialog box.
  • Select Hindi in the Input Language list and Hindi Traditional in the Keyboard Layout/IME list.
  • Click OK. Now, the Installed services box should also show a Hindi entry.
  • Click the Language Bar... button and check the "Show the Language bar on the desktop" box. This will give you a button on the desktop, to enable you to switch between Hindi and English as the input language.
Now you just need to know which keys on your keyboard will give you which Hindi characters. You can refer to the Microsoft Bhasha page for this info. Go ahead, open Notepad and type away! Another, easier, way to type is to use and online editor: Chhahari or Lakshminarayanan's page (also has support for several other Indic languages). Of course you could download some Hindi word processor like HindiPad, but where's the fun in that?!

Hindi on YOUR website

अपनी वैबसाइट पर हिन्दी: How did I put this phrase here? Its pretty simple. Pick out the Unicode values for each Hindi (Devanagari) character from the Unicode charts here and put them into your html code. For example, ख (including the semi-colon at the end) shows up as ख. Just replace "0916" with whatever is the code of the character you are looking for. These codes are in hexadecimal. If you want to use decimal values, remove the 'x' from ख and change the hex value to its decimal equivalent.
Another, easier, way to do this is to type some Hindi in your favorite editor and paste it into your html.
Of course, all the font and style tags still work as expected.

Web-accessible Calendar (one method)

Here is an example of what I am talking about. Here is how my calendar works:
  • Writing to calendar: I use Mozilla Sunbird (equivalent to Lightning and Calendar).
  • Viewing calendar: Either in Sunbird, or on any web browser anywhere in the world (read only).

If you like this setup, read on. I edit the calendar from a Windows XP machine (should work also from Linux/Unix) and have the calendar file stored on a web server running Linux/Unix.
  • Download Mozilla Sunbird (or Mozilla Lightning or Mozilla Calendar), and install.
  • On your web server, download and install PHP iCalendar in a place accessible by your web server. Say you installed in $website_home_folder/phpicalendar.
  • Go inside the phpicalendar folder and set permissions to 755 for ALL files (chmod -R 755 *).
  • In Sunbird select File→New Calendar File....
  • Create a Local calendar file, with at least one entry, say newcal.ics.
  • Ftp this new file, newcal.ics, to your webserver and put it in phpicalendar/calendars/.
  • Remove the other files already present in the phpicalendar/calendars folder to some other safe place: you might need them for other things, not mentioned here.
  • Again, in Sunbird select File→New Calendar File....
  • Select Remote and press Next.
  • Select WebDAV and enter the Location as ftp://username:password@ftpserver/$path_after_ftp_home/phpicalendar/calendars/newcal.ics. Here username and password are your ftp username and password on the server ftpserver, where you installed PHP iCalendar. Press Next.
  • Enter a name for your calendar (e.g. NewCal) and press Next and then Finish.
  • You should see a new calendar named NewCal in the Calendars list in Sunbird (top left). Click on it so it is highlighted.
  • Make your entries in the calendar. This will automatically update your remote file. This completes the editing side of things.
  • To access your calendar, open a browser and enter http://yourdomain.com/phpicalendar: it should show you your calendar!