I have an article that contains a lot of Devanagari vowel signs in it. The vowel signs are intended to combine with the preceding character and do so in Word, InDesign, etc. However, when using Noto Serif Devanagari and Prince, I get a dotted circle character in front of the vowel sign in the PDF output. Based on an author suggestion, we then switched to the Nirmala UI font and saw the same output from Prince. The same output happens using both Prince 11.4 and Prince 12.4.

A code snippet from the HTML (which renders fine) is below and shown in the attached PDF:
<blockquote id="s3-3-5-disp-quote1">
<div class="p" id="s3-3-5-disp-quote1-p1">
<span class="nirmala">गैर सिंधी स्कूल में <span class="nirmala-bold">पड़हं</span>दड़ शागिर्दनि लाइ सेकंड ॿोली सिंधीअ जे दरसी किताब में ॿोलीअ सां वास्तो रखंदड़ लियाकतुनि ॿुधणु, ॻाल्हाइणु <span class="no-hyphen">-</span> ॿोल्हाइण, <span class="nirmala-bold">पढ़ह</span>ण ऐं लिखण खे अभ्यास ॾिनो वियो आहे.</span>
</div>
</blockquote>

Has anyone else had to use the vowel sign characters from this unicode range (U+0900-097F) before? If so, how did you achieve the correct display with Prince?

1. devanagari-example.pdf‎ 370.2 kB ‎
   devanagari sample from Prince

Nirmala uses the Indic2 shaping model, whereas Prince 12 only supports the Indic1 shaping model. However we are adding support for Indic2 right now (and testing with Nirmala yesterday, as it happens!) so this situation will be rectified shortly. In the meantime, perhaps you could use an Indic1 font, like Lohit Devanagari?

Some months have passed and the Prince latest builds are now available with support for the Indic2 shaping model and the Nirmala font! We have worked hard on improving support for Indic text so please let us know if you encounter any issues.

Thank you so much for this! I was finally able to test it on this problematic article today and the results are exactly what we expect. Thanks for working so tirelessly on these issues.