I just got an iMac and wondered, why all the Indian-name typefaces? I assume they include Indian character glyphs, but why so many? Why are they seemingly the same? For example, the following look (nearly) identical (and these probably aren't even comprehensive because I stopped at "M"):
Set 1:
Malayalam
Bangla
Lao
Gurmukhi
Kannada
Myanmar
Set 2:
Bangala Sangram
Devanagari MT
Gjuarati Sangram
Inai Mathi
Lao Sangram
Myanmar Sangram
Malayalam Sangram
Just curious.
When you say 'they look the same', are you looking at the Indian characters, or at Latin characters that show up in the font preview or font menu listings? The latter might be substituted from other fonts.
If I list only the *Sangam* fonts I have on OS X 10.7, I get
Bangla Sangam MN.ttf Devanagari Sangam MN.ttc Gujarati Sangam MN.ttf Kannada Sangam MN.ttf Malayalam Sangam MN.ttf Oriya Sangam MN.ttf Sinhala Sangam MN.ttf Tamil Sangam MN.ttf Telugu Sangam MN.ttf Khmer Sangam MN.ttf Lao Sangam MN.ttf Myanmar Sangam MN.ttf
The last three correspond to Southeast Asian Scripts, the first group to South Asian Scripts, as you can see on the Unicode Character Code Charts.
Bangla corresponds to Bengali. Inai Mathi is Tamil if I rely on the unicode range it covers.
John, I am only looking at the Font Preview. But unless you need Indian characters, there's really no reason to keep these activated (or keep them in general), correct?
In case you are interested in seeing how different these various Indic scripts actually are, have a look at this page (before you deactivate the fonts):
Captured from web.archive.org on 12 Mar 2015. view this capture