Internationalization - Devanagari

[Girish Kulkarni]

(I had posted this on gnu.emacs.help about a week ago but Eli
Zaretskii suggested this would be the proper place.)

Using GNU Emacs 22.1.1 on Ubuntu 7.04. I have a limited understanding
of fonts related issues in Linux, and three possibly naive questions:

 0. I installed the Intlfonts distribution today, to try out the
Devanagari font support in Emacs. The installation was okay, and I
also added the installation directory to the font path. The README
file that came with the distribution then says something like, "The
file Emacs.ap contains X resource setting of fontsets for various size
fonts (14, 16, 18, and 24 dots)." Could somebody explain this to me?

 1. I tried entering some Devanagari characters in an empty buffer
using a Devanagari ITRANS keyboard and found that now Emacs could
render them, but not quite correctly -- the ligatures do not form at
all. Devanagari ligatures is usually a hard issue everywhere; how has
Emacs solved it?

 2. Although my Emacs could render these few Devanagari characters
that I entered, it only showed  empty boxes in the HELLO file. Why did
this happen?

Maybe I should spend some more time with the Info pages on
internationalization. But it would be nice if somebody explains.

-- 
Girish Kulkarni - Allahabad, India - http://girish.50webs.com