Re: [unifont] Unicode (sanskrit) width problem

[Paul Hardy]

Hadrien,

On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 2:22 PM, Hadrien Lacour
<address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 08:26:13PM -0700, Paul Hardy wrote:
> > Hadrien,
> >
> > On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 3:30 PM, Hadrien Lacour <
> > address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > > Hello,
> > > here's a strange problem I'm encountering with Unifont and Sanskrit:
> > > https://files.catbox.moe/q6c3mj.webm
> > >
>
> I tried with the PCF font (xterm -fn '-*-unifont-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*'),
> and the problems are even more pronounced.
>
> ...


I think this is approximately what you typed:

सहा र रࣳवव काा  लऻौ


In an xterm window, I saw similar behavior highlighting the TrueType
version under Debian (I don't have a running Gentoo system), but when
I highlighted over it again the final character came back.  There was
no spurious dot though.  in LibreOffice, that did not happen at all.
It might just be that xterm does not highlight combining characters
correctly.

However, if you are going to use Sanskrit (or any modern Indic
language, etc.), I recommend you use a TrueType font that has
character combinations (ligatures) encoded.  Pairs or even triplets of
letters will change shape when combined with each other.  Unifont only
encodes one glyph per code point, and is only intended as a font of
last resort.  It does not have support for extra glyphs to encode
ligature combinations.

There is a Sanskrit font from Omkarananda Ashram in India that is free
in the sense that it doesn't cost anything, and free in the sense that
there are no restrictions on its use, but there aren't explicit
permissions (or restrictions for that matter) to modify the font to
your liking.  If you ever did find a change that needed to be made
though, you should probably send them any modifications you make as
suggestions.  Here is a short blurb on the font on a University of
Chicago website, with a sample of the font:

http://salrc.uchicago.edu/resources/fonts/available/sanskrit/sanskrit2003.shtml

You can see ligatures in the font that Unifont does not have the
capability to support, and observe how much nicer it looks than the
bitmap-patterned Unifont.

There are probably other free Devanagari (Hindi/Sanskrit) fonts that
are "free" in both senses of the word, but I am not familiar with
them.

Is using such a TrueType font with more complete encoding than Unifont
supports an option for you?


Paul