Why Hindi books often look wrong: a short guide to Devanagari typesetting
Devanagari behaves differently from Roman letters, and typesetting tools made for English often get it wrong. Here is what to watch for.
The QuillBees team
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·3 min read
Open a few Hindi books and you may notice the text feels slightly off. The letters look cramped, a vowel sign sits too far away, or a line has a strange gap. Often it is the typesetting, not the writing.
Why Devanagari is harder
English letters sit side by side on a line. Devanagari letters join to a horizontal line at the top, called the shirorekha, and they combine in more complicated ways.
- Matras. Vowel signs can go above, below, before or after the main letter. The "i" sign (ि), for example, is written before the letter it follows in sound.
- Conjuncts. Two or more consonants can fuse into one shape, as in क्ष, त्र or श्र. A good font has many of these built in.
- Half letters. A consonant can appear in a half form, attached to the next letter, as in प्र.
- Nukta and other marks. Small dots and signs that must sit in exactly the right place.
A tool that treats each character as a separate box will produce wrong shapes. The text must be passed through software that understands how the letters combine.
Common problems
Broken conjuncts. Letters that should fuse appear separately with a visible halant sign. It reads as if the word has been chopped.
Misplaced matras. A vowel sign floating away from its letter, or overlapping the line above.
Line spacing too tight. Devanagari has tall marks above and below the line. English line spacing makes them crash into each other. Hindi usually needs a little more.
The shirorekha not joining. A gap in the top line between letters makes words look broken.
Bad justification. When a line is stretched to fit, spaces between words get huge. Hindi words are often long, so this is worse than in English.
Copy and paste problems. Text pasted from some sources may come in with the wrong characters, which look fine on screen but break when printed.
What to do
- Use a typesetting tool that properly supports Devanagari shaping. Check with a test paragraph that has many conjuncts.
- Pick a font designed for Devanagari, and check it handles all the letters you use.
- Set a slightly larger line spacing than you would for English.
- Print a sample page and read it, instead of trusting the screen.
- Ask someone fluent in Hindi to review the typeset pages.
A simple test
Make a test page with words that stress the system. Include क्ष, ज्ञ, श्र, द्ध, ट्ट, and words with ि, ी, ु, ू, े, ै, ो, ौ and nukta letters like ज़ and फ़. Look at how each one prints. If any look wrong, the tool or font has a problem.
Care pays off
Readers do not usually say "the typesetting was bad". They just feel tired and put the book down. Getting the details right is part of respecting the text.
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