Some other devanagari fonts like Krutidev, etc are not unicode compliant. So, Siddhanta becomes the next best choice which (though freely available) is not preinstalled in computers and has to be installed. Hence Mangal is my first choice but Mangal does not have ancient Vedic characters (example accent numbers of Saamved). Mangal is freely available with Windows and other operating softwares (of computers and mobiles). Mangal and Siddhanta are the most common Devanagari fonts. The fonts which keep the characters identifiable to their assigned alpha numeric Unicodes are called Unicode Fonts. Example Arial, Calibri, Mangal, Siddhanta, etc. The fonts are like set of designs for given sets of characters (keeping their form intact).
This task has been done with the help of many Governments, including the Government of India and has been done for all Indic scripts including Devanagari, which includes the ancient Vedic characters also.
The Unicode Consortium ( ) has done a mammoth task of (a) discovering: all the major scripts of the world, all the letters/ characters in those scripts, the correct form and names of all such characters and (b) assigning an alphanumeric code to each character.
