Hi, Here is a systematic way of trying things. Could you come on IRC tonight, or at some pre-arranged time to work on this? 1. Let us start with a single Malayalam font, and check the rendering on the system, before worrying about Indic-enabled browsers. If you are aware of which fonts provide Malayalam on your system, please remove them temporarily, and start with the Samyak font from <http://www.gnowledge.org/Gnoware/localization/Samyak_Font/new/Samyak_Malayalam.ttf> 2. After installing Samyak, show me the output of fc-list :lang-ml 3. The best Unicode editor that I have come across is yudit (http://www.yudit.org/), though it is not very efficient as an editor. Install this, either by compiling it yourself, or from an Ubuntu package. yudit uses a configuration file, ~/.yudit/yudit.properties. There is also a system-wide file, /usr/share/yudit/config/yudit.properties, that is copied the first time you start up yudit. So, make the suggested change below to the system-wide file *before* starting yudit, or to the personal file of the user you are running as. Edit yudit.properties, find the line starting with, "yudit.font.TrueType=...", and append the name of the .ttf font file for Samyak, e.g., Samyak_Malayalam.ttf. To avoid confusion, I have attached my yudit.properties file that you can simply copy to the appropriate location. Make the font available to yudit. Copy the .ttf file to /usr/share/yudit/fonts, or make a symbolic link to where you have installed it in the system. Start up yudit. If you are using the yudit.properties file that I have attached, you should now see "TrueType" in the font tab (third from left), and "Malayalam" in the input tab. Else, do a shift+F2 for the font tab, and a F3 for the input tab, with the attached yudit.properties file. Now you should be able to type in Malayalam with a pseudo-phonetic (ITRANS) layout. If you prefer Inscript, use F2. 4. Ideally, one would check rendering with a comprehensive list of conjuncts in Malayalam, e.g., for an Oriya equivalent, see http://oriya.sarovar.org/or_conjuncts.html. While it can be time- consuming, and sometimes a contentious issuse, to come up with such a list, my personal feeling is that it is essential. Please let me know if you would be willing to type this up in yudit, which should render it correctly. It is sufficent to start with a list from a dictionary, for example. 5. Armed with such a list, and what is hopefully a reference rendering from yudit, I, or someone else, could fix any bugs in Pango. If it is too much of a hassle to compile a complete list, you can type in snippets that have improper rendering, save the file as utf-8 (default with yudit), and open it in gedit to investigate differences in rendering. 6. You can short-circuit some of this work by looking at how your browser renders examples at http://www.m17n.org/m17n-lib/. However, this uses yet another rendering library, m17n, and the short- circuiting skips enough steps that I hope you will understand if I do not have the time to help you out separately with that.
Regards,
Gora
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yudit.properties
Description: 2296871771-yudit.properties
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