devnag: Devanāgarī for TEX

The Devanāgarī for TEX (devnag) package provides a way to typeset high-quality Devanāgarī text with TEX. The devnag package provides features that support Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, and other languages typically printed in the Devanāgarī script. The devnag package was released in May 1991 by Frans Velthuis for the University of Groningen, The Netherlands (see some historical remarks  here). The devnag package consists of a preprocessor, font files, and macros for Plain TEX and LATEX. From 1 Jan 2005, the home page of the Devanāgarī project is The software can be downloaded from the development website at where discussion lists, bug-reporting, the names of the developers, and other and other information and facilities are also available.

The "bleeding edge" of current Devanāgarī tools and support files can be downloaded from Sarovar's CVS version control tree of the Devnag project, at
For example, in 2008 there are files in the CVS tree that support typesetting Devanāgarī text with XeTEX.  Using XeTEremoves the need to use the separate pre-processor devnag.c for converting Velthuis input into Devanāgarī output.  XeTEX itself can now take do that job internally.  XeTEX also makes possible typesetting scholarly transliteration directly, when input in UTF-8.  See the helpful installation instructions by Daniel Stender.   And a  XeTeX configuration file that enables the conversion of unicode transliteration directly into Devanāgarī has been published by Somadeva Vasudeva.

Bear in mind that taking files from the development tree means you will be using what is effectively alpha and beta release software.  Expect it to be experimental.

The main public release package is also available from the Comprehensive TEX Archive Network (CTAN) at or at various mirrors, in the directory
The Devnag development team
Dec 02, 2004
updated Mar 30, 2008