[smc-devel] Linux and Malayalam Unicode

[Vinod]

Hi,
   I'm involved in setting up Malayalam Wikipedia
[ml.wikipedia.org] which uses Unicode. I have a few
questions on the Pango module and the Unicode font
from SMC. 

It appears that the module+font combination handles
Unicode in a slightly non-standard way. By standard I
mean the recently released Unicode 4.0
http://www.unicode.org/book/preview/ch09.pdf

To produce chillaksharangal when using patched
Pango+MalOtf, I have to code 
consonant+anuswaram+virama, while pg 33 in the chapter
linked above stipulates that consonant+virama+zwj
should be used. This error also appears in the ml_IN
locale released by FSF. To check this, please cut
paste from the following page into Gedit:
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vinodmp/wiki/Chilltest.html

Another error I noticed is that the RA sign [as in
chithram] is not always rendered correctly. The sign
appears on the right side instead of the left when
consonant+virama+RA is used [RA as in maram], and it
appears correctly on the left side when
consonant+virama+RRA [RRA as in paara] is used. It
should be on the left side in both cases.

I noticed the above viewing what I believe to be
standard-compliant text in gedit with the patched
Pango module [patch from Baiju's webpage] and MalOtf.
Akruti font produces the same results. Thoolika
Traditional Unicode font [from
http://www.supersoftweb.com/Unicode.htm] which has a
large glyph collection produces a lot more errors when
used with the patched Pango module though this font
works quite well in Microsoft Windows. Why is this
happening? 

I'm also interested in finding out whether there is
anybody working on making Mozilla in Linux display
Malayalam Unicode correctly.

Thanks,
Vinod

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