More information is available here.

Unicode is about *character* encoding; while fonts is all about *glyphs*; they are different, particularly for devanagari and such scripts!

What happened before unicode is that the iscii encoding wasn't implemented by much vendors (in fact, any OS implementing iscii and having devanagari support was not heard of); and users wanting to print/display in devanagari did it by using cp1252 encoding (that is the encoding used in USA and Western europe, with latin accented letters) and using fonts that display some devanagari glyphs instead of the latin accented letters; it more or less worked, but for the
computer (and so, for query engines, lexical databases, conversion programs, sorting order, etc, etc) it was NOT devanagari, but a meaningless bunch of latin letters.

In fact the display support of complex alphabets that exists now could very well have been implemented using iscii (btw, there was in pango support for Tamil tscii 8bit encoding for example (now everything uses unicode only, for simplicity); the problem was that if you need to deal with a lot of encodings, it gets very complex, and you don't want to start... Unicode by making it a unique and unified encoding made things much simpler, and also, as unicode allows multilingual
text, it increased the demand for complex language support, in fact unicode increased the awareness of the existance of some languages, that previously no much people would have heard of.

As Unicode internally provides an number for each character, hence for Computer, it is very easy to work with. Now with the help of Unicode, Hindi Text can be sorted, desired words or sentences can be searched on web, full powers of Databases can be applied on Hindi Text. Set the encoding to utf-8 in your Browser or other utility, install any Unicode-Hindi font on your system and enjoy this technique.

The need of the hour is Creation of Contents in Hindi. ! This can be from the creation of One-page web-site to Hindi Localisation of a Complete Operating System. It could be of any knowledge or science.

Come! Take benefit from this technique and
With the help of Unicode, Hindi and Mandrakelinux,
Display and share your knowledge and experience
in Hindi Language with the World !