Category: Nepali fonts and layout

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For those of you who are looking for quick answer for how to type aakar ukar in Nepali, try searching the smart quotes option on the respective application and disable it.

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Many of the beginner Nepali typist come across the problem of typing ukaar (?) in Nepali. Every time you type ukar the ms word turns it into something else. Many of you may have tackled by doing undo every time the character changes it, but its tedious and definitely not the way to do it.

This changing of a word is due to a feature of word which converts the quote (‘) into a smart quote. If you have noticed while typing English, directions of opening quote and closing quotes are different. So if you have opened the quote then it will be in one position and if you have closed the quote it will be upside down.

Here the first one has a smart quote and the latter does not have. So typing with default setting in ms word causes your ukaar ? to change.

Because ms word is specially designed to work for typing English, ms word default settings won’t bother you while typing in English. But it can be a headache while typing Nepali. Every once in a while your typed word changes into something else.

Now lets see how we can tackle the problem. The above happening is due to the ms word auto correct feature. If you have noticed, small typing errors in English are automatically corrected. Capitalization of first letters  is one of them. So in order to type Nepali you have to make some changes in the ms word auto correct option.

In previous version of ms word it is located at tools>autocorrect options.

The later version 2007 has the autocorrect options at options>proofing>autocorrect option. (The option can be found at the top left button circle button)

or File>options>proofing>autocorrect options in ms word 2010.

Step 1

Open the autocorrect dialogue box

Step 2

In the auto correct option click Autoformat as you type tab and uncheck the ?Straight quotes? with ?smart quotes?.

Doing this helps you type ukaar while typing in Nepali. Also you might what to uncheck other things like automatic capitalization in autocorrect tab if you are typing lots of Nepali.

*In other programs you can type ukaar by disabling the smart quote feature in the respective programs.