We got an rtf file created in Mac TextEdit containing Devanagari characters. The instructor needs to have that as a doc file because a publisher insists on that file format.

We installed the Devanagari font on a mac.

We can create a doc file and a docx file from textedit. Those files display properly in TextEdit and in OpenOffice (as does the rtf file), but we cannot get any version of Word on a Mac to display devanagari characters, even after we'd installed the Devanagari font (which of course has glyphs for the devanagari character range). Word didn't show the devanagari font on its font list.

We did get a version of Word running on Windows to display the characters in the .doc file by changing the font of the entire document to Arial Unicode MS (which ships with MS Office) and includes glyphs for the Devanagari character block. When we looked at that file on the Mac, the Devanagari does not appear, presumably because the Mac does not have Arial Unicode MS installed on it and Word on the Mac is not smart enough to figure out it has a font which will display the glyphs.