Knowledge Base - Using Arial UNICODE MS in MS Word

The Tunga font has only Kannada characters. Similarly, the Mangal font has only Devanagari characters. But, Arial UNICODE MS font (that comes with Office 2000) has characters from various scripts including Kannada and Devanagari. It is found that in some cases when you are using Tunga or Mangal fonts in Notepad, Wordpad, MS Office XP applications, you see 'square box' characters instead of Indian language characters. This may be due to above applications not recognising the Tunga & Mangal fonts properly. But if you use the Arial UNICODE MS font instead, you will get the proper output. The following steps shows how to use Arial UNICODE MS font in the MS Office XP applications.

In MS Word XP, Click "Format --> Styles and Formatting" menu command.

In the "Styles and Formatting" window pane, right click on the "Normal" style and select "Modify" menu.

In the "Modify Style" dialog, select "(all scripts)" and select "Arial UNICODE MS" font as shown in the picture. Check "Add to template" check box and click OK button.

Modify Style Dialog Box in MS Word XP

Select the "Normal" style in the Formatting tool bar and start typing Indian language UNICODE text in the MS Word using BarahaIME.

Selecting the Normal Style