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Every language has a set of fonts, which will have to be installed into the Operating System before the languages are displayed. Moreover the font corresponding to that language is to be selected as the font for display before typing in that language. Each language has a set of keyboard drivers or engine that translates the key strokes as per the language keyboard. The driver can handle a variety of layouts. With the combination of fonts and drivers, Indian Languages can be easily used in any Windows application.
Everyone using a computer is aware about fonts. Changing a font you can change the appearance of text on the screen (and the way it gets printed). So if some Indian language fonts are installed on you computer, you can read text in Indian languages.
The languages available are Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Kannada, Bengali, Oriya, Telugu, Malayalam and Punjabi. The numerals will be in the language for Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Oriya, and Telugu. International numerals will be available in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, and Punjabi.
A different typeface means, different shape of the alphabet. But in one typeface -- or a shape, you can have variations like BOLD and ITALICS. So a font family consists of different variations or styles you can have in that family (Normal, Italics, Bold, Bold-Italics).
This will be clear from the following illustration :
Usually, the fonts on the computers can have 256 different characters. (With, Unicode
support, which is now becoming a new standard, the barrier of 256 character is no longer
there) So people who design fonts for Indian languages have to place Indian language
alphabets in those 256 positions. Many different software developers have designed number
of different fonts and each developer uses different philosophy to place Indian language
alphabets in this table. It may happen that in one font letter 
appears in position number 65, while in another font letter 
appears in position number 65. This is the reason why even if you have downloaded one
Gujarati font from the internet, you may not be able to use it to read Gujarati text on
any other web site. Or for that matter, you can not read or use text prepared in one
Indian Language software unless you also copy and install the fonts that are used in that
text.
Installing Indian Language fonts enables you to read the text typed by someone else, but what if you want to type texts in Indian languages. The usual keyboard we have with the computer allows you to type only English alphabets. But using a software called keyboard driver, the keys on the usual English keyboard are mapped to Indian alphabets. So depending on the keyboard driver, different English keys on your keyboard will give different Indian alphabet. Different keyboard layouts are described in the section "Different Keyboard Layouts."