How do you do that???

I have been inundated with queries asking how I have managed to acquire this new ability to type marathi into things like MSN Messenger so that now I can really chat with a person in my mother tongue - provided of course the other person is electronically equipped to decipher what I send across. So, to save me time and effort of repeating the procedure to everyone, I am scribbling up this basic "Steps to follow" blog. With the proper setup and a little bit of luck, most people should be able to read, if not write unicode while chatting and stuff. (All this applies to Windoze only... haven't tried anything on Linux/Mac yet, and neither do I intend to in the near future. If anyone has, let me know too :P ).Here goes:

1. At a minimum, to read any Devnagari text, you need to have the right fonts installed. If you are running WinXP, you would probably have a font called Mangal installed already. Otherwise, you need to download some devnagari font. At the time of writing, Mangal was available here. Just copy the .ttf file to Control Panel/Fonts and you are off.
   
2. To be able to read devanagari in MSN, you need to install the latest version (7.0) from the link at the top pf this post (I have no idea if unicode is supported in 6.x).
   
3. Now the interesting part. To be able to type in marathi, you need a good and simple editor that will convert your keystrokes to the appropriate unicode. The one I am using is Baraha. Download and install that.
   
4. Run Start ->Programs ->Baraha ->Baraha Direct. It will put an icon in the taskbar, double click that. On the settings window that pops up, select the language you want (Marathi, for instance), and the format as Unicode. Close the window and run it again (annoying, I know).
5. Run MSN messenger and start typing in marathi text as you would in a normal minglish chat :). You should be able to see it get converted to some devnagari text. Now, it won't be exactly what you had in mind of course. So, now you need to read the Devnagari translation rules (in Baraha's help) for a little while. They are really simple and with a little bit of practice, you can type away in your preferred language.

PS: You can keep the tool running and toggle between Marathi and English input using the F11 key.

Happy typing!