OpenType fonts

I recently found the "anyone can be provincial" page
(http://www.trigeminal.com/samples/provincial.html) and noticed that, with
Internet Explorer, if I click on the link, download the Code2000 font, and
set it as the default font for Devanagari, the system actually puts the
Hindi characters in the correct order, and at least attempts to handle some
of the ligatures. After some playing around with copy & paste, I noticed
that WordPad also handles specialized fonts like this, but unfortunately
Word 2000 doesn't. Still, if I could get WordPad and Internet Explorer to
work with OpenType fonts, I might finally be able to handle Olaetian
ligatures correctly, and for the first time ever be able to create proper
fonts for my old hand-drawn languages. So I looked around on the Microsoft
typography site, and after jumping through all the hoops to get a copy of
their VOLT editor, tried making a simple font with a single ligature.

Nothing happened.

True, the OpenType specification is pretty hard to figure out, and I might
have missed something, but how hard can it be to tell the computer to make
a ligature out of two characters? I went over and over the documentation
and tried a bunch of random things that didn't have any effect. Could it be
that Internet Explorer and WordPad are hard-coded to do special processing
only with Arabic and Devanagari scripts? Could it be something to do with
Windows 98? I know Windows 2000 is _supposed_ to be better with Unicode,
but I don't want to spend a lot of money upgrading and find out that it
doesn't make any difference. Besides, I _really_ don't like upgrading the
operating system if I don't have to. Too many things can go wrong.

Has anyone had any experience with editing OpenType fonts?

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