BarahaIME in MS Office 2003 Apps

BarahaIME (or Baraha Direct in Unicode mode) works without any problems in MS Excel, MS Publisher and MS Access. But there are problems when using BarahaIME with MS Word and MS PowerPoint applications.

BarahaIME in MS Word:

When you select Bengali language in the BarahaIME and type some text in MS Word, the Vrinda font (default Unicode font for Bengali) is automatically selected and Bengali characters are displayed as expected. Malayalam language also works as expected. (Interestingly, the scripts that were introduced in Windows XP SP2 work just fine!)

However, when you select Kannada language in the BarahaIME and type some text, the Tunga font (default Unicode font for Kannada) is not automatically selected and hence square boxes are shown instead of the expected Kannada characters. This problem exists for Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati languages also.

Why does square box appear instead of the Kannada character?

An application prints a "square box" if the font that is being used doesn't have the required character in it. MS Word doesn't seem to recognize the characters coming from the BarahaIME as Kannada characters and incorrectly selects the Arial font instead of Tunga. This results in the square boxes since Arial doesn't have the Kannada characters. Let's hope MS Word fixes this problem in the future releases. In the meantime, there is a workaround to use BarahaIME in MS Word.

BarahaIME in MS Power Point:

When you type text into PowerPoint, the respective default font for the language is not automatically selected for any of the Indian language. Though the actual characters are shown instead of the square boxes, certain words are broken in the middle.