Hindi Typing in PageMaker: Complete Setup
PageMaker was discontinued in 2004 and is still opened daily in Indian government offices and small print shops, where the .pmd and .p65 files it produces represent decades of active documents. Hindi typing in it works the same way it always did: install a legacy Devanagari font, set the font before typing, and compose with the keys that font maps. What is different now is that modern Windows does not agree PageMaker should run at all, so the setup has one extra step, and the output has one more too, because anything you save is legacy the moment it leaves the app.
What PageMaker is, and why it still turns up
PageMaker was an Aldus product from 1985, acquired by Adobe in 1994, and discontinued after version 7.0 in 2004. Two decades on it still runs, with a bit of help, on Windows 10 and 11, and it still opens the .pmd and .p65 files people wrote in it.
The reason it turns up now is those files. Municipal offices, school boards, government press units, and small commercial print shops built libraries of PageMaker templates through the 1990s and early 2000s, and those templates carry on quietly because the alternative is rebuilding everything from scratch in a modern layout tool, which nobody has the time or the budget for.
Install the pieces
Three things need to be present on the machine.
- PageMaker 7.0 itself. The installer was distributed on CD-ROM and is not sold by Adobe today. Any copy you obtain should be one you or your organisation legitimately hold, since PageMaker's licence never included redistribution rights.
- A KrutiDev-family font. The typical choice is KrutiDev 010, the same font that most Indian offices standardised on. Install it like any other TrueType font: right-click the .ttf and choose Install. The font must also be present on every machine that later opens the document, since PageMaker does not embed fonts into the file.
- The KrutiDev keyboard mapping. Hindi in PageMaker with a KrutiDev font means typing the Latin key that draws the intended Devanagari glyph. There is no visual guide on a standard keyboard, so you either learn the layout by memory or keep a printed reference sheet at the desk.
If PageMaker refuses to install, or crashes on launch, the cause is almost always Windows compatibility. Right-click the installer or the installed PageMaker.exe, open Properties → Compatibility, and set it to run as Windows XP Service Pack 3. That is the Windows version PageMaker 7.0 was built against, and it is what modern Windows needs to lie about for the app to run.
Font install has its own failure modes, covered on the page about KrutiDev not installing on Windows. A font Word cannot see will not appear in PageMaker either.
Composing Hindi
Set the font to KrutiDev 010, or your chosen variant, before you start typing. PageMaker does not switch fonts to render Devanagari on its own; it draws whichever glyphs the active font contains, so a document that comes out as broken English is a font problem, not a typing problem.
Conjuncts, half-characters, and complex matras compose the same way they do in any other application with the same font. Visible dotted circles or misplaced matras mean the composition rule was mistyped rather than PageMaker misbehaving.
What breaks and why
Font substitution
PageMaker warns when it cannot find a font used in a document and substitutes something present. On Devanagari that produces the classic broken-English look, since the fallback font draws Latin glyphs for the Latin bytes the file actually contains. The fix is to install the exact font the document names.
Encoding on save
PageMaker files store text as 8-bit bytes and the name of the font. That is why a document reads correctly only when the exact font is installed on the target machine, and why the same file opened on a machine with only Mangal or Nirmala UI comes up as garbled Latin. There is no encoding upgrade you can apply from inside PageMaker; the file format itself predates the option.
PDF export
PageMaker embeds fonts into PDFs, so the exported document renders correctly for anyone opening the PDF. But copying Hindi text out of that PDF hands back Latin bytes rather than Devanagari, because that is what PageMaker put in the file. This is the same problem covered on the page about converting a KrutiDev Word file to Unicode: the display and the extractable text are two different things.
Moving off PageMaker
If you need to keep editing the layout, migration to InDesign is Adobe's official path. Whether the current InDesign release opens .pmd and .p65 files directly depends on the version, and Adobe's own migration documentation covers the cases where it does not.
If you only need the text, converting is faster. Copy passages out of PageMaker, paste them into the KrutiDev converter, and take Unicode Devanagari back. From there the text goes anywhere modern: Word, InDesign, email, a website. The layout does not come with it, but for most inherited documents the text is what matters and the layout can be redone once against a template.
Edge cases
Files in the older .p65 format
These predate 7.0 and use an earlier file format. Opening them in PageMaker 7 works and re-saves them as .pmd. Later tools open them up to a point but often need cleanup around composition and page geometry.
The file looks correct on screen but exports as boxes
The PDF export options in PageMaker allow font embedding to be turned off. Never turn it off for Devanagari documents. Without embedded fonts the PDF renders as boxes on any viewer without KrutiDev installed, which is almost every viewer.
Windows 11 install stalls partway
Beyond compatibility mode, installers occasionally fail on modern Windows because of missing legacy runtime libraries. When a compatibility-mode reinstall does not clear it, the issue is upstream of PageMaker itself, at the Windows setup level.
Structure survives but every letter is wrong
Same font-substitution problem the display shows, but from someone else's machine at save time. The document was written with a font your machine does not have. Recovering the intended text needs the original font name, which the Story window in PageMaker exposes when a text block is selected.
Where this fits
PageMaker is one specific setting for a general problem. The KrutiDev font, the composition rules, and the byte-versus-glyph gap are the same across Word, CorelDRAW, InDesign, and older DTP tools. The Hindi font resources index covers the other places these problems arrive.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, though not without help. Right-click the installer, open Properties, and set Compatibility Mode to Windows XP Service Pack 3 before running it. Apply the same setting to the installed PageMaker.exe. That is the version PageMaker 7.0 was built against, and it is what modern Windows needs to lie about for the app to run.
KrutiDev 010 is the standard in most Indian offices and small print shops, and files you produce with it will open correctly on the widest set of machines. Chanakya is common in publishing, and Shusha family fonts appear in older files. Whichever you pick, the font must be installed on any machine that opens the file, since PageMaker does not embed the font into the document itself.
That machine does not have the font the document was written in. PageMaker files store 8-bit Latin bytes plus a font name, and rely on the target system for the font. Install the same KrutiDev variant on the receiving machine and the Devanagari returns.
Not usefully. PageMaker predates Unicode Indic shaping, so even if you set the font to Mangal, the app cannot compose conjuncts and matras the way a Unicode-aware application would. Hindi in PageMaker is a legacy-font workflow by design, and Unicode fonts belong in InDesign or Word.
Copy the KrutiDev text out of PageMaker, paste it into a converter, and take Unicode Devanagari back. From there it goes into anything modern: Word, InDesign, email, a website. The layout does not survive the round-trip, but the text does, which is usually what you actually need.
Migrate if you plan to keep editing the layout. Convert if you only need the text. Migration preserves structure at the cost of setup work per document; conversion is faster but hands back plain Unicode you rebuild the layout around. Files that will not be touched again do not need either. Leave them where they are.