Strictly speaking the phrase is meaningless, as Unicode is character set encoding and not a font encoding.

However, some languages have writing systems that map the characters of the script one-to-one to their character encodings (most Indic scripts do not have this property). For such languages, you could define a font such that its font encoding matches the corresponding range of characters in the Unicode standard so that Unicode code points could be used to directly select individual glyphs in the font.

Such a font could be termed, rather colloquially as ``unicode compliant''.

The addressing scheme used for a fonts glyphs is called a ``font encoding''.

For example, in the X Window System, fonts are defined as arrays of glyphs indexed by an integer index. In these fonts, the mapping between the integer index value and the glyph is known as the ``encoding'' of the font.

Other font technologies have different ways of accessing the glyphs in the font. For example, glyphs in PostScript Type 1 fonts are named using symbolic names. In order to make the use of Type 1 fonts convenient, such fonts may also contain mapping tables mapping character set encoding code points to the symbolic names of glyphs (there will be one such table per supported character set encoding). These mapping tables are sometimes referred to as ``font encodings''.

There are a number of fonts available on the Internet for Indian scripts. Rather than list these here, we instead list the URLs of well-known font archives that track fonts for Indian scripts.

Font Archives

• Luc Devroye maintains an archive of Indic fonts at the Indic Language Fonts page.

• The Summer Institute of Linguistics provides a searchable database of fonts at the Fonts in Cyberspace page.

• The Open Directory Project maintains a useful page on Indic fonts.

You could search the archives of the project's mailing lists; a number of projects have posted news there on the availability of their work.