Problem with rendering tamil fonts

thinkanish · 2013-09-29 18:13:03

Hello,
I tried every known method. But I can't be able to render these tamil fonts. But I know its possible (Because, I've seen some Gnome terminals rendering it correctly). Here is the problem, and solutions I tried. But i can't find the solution and the worst case, i can't even figure out the problem.

Here is what I am using:
Shell : bash 4.2
terminal : rxvt-unicode (patched)
Editor : Geany
Browser: Firefox.

Here is my problem:
I have set extra tamil fonts in Xresources and also installed GNU Unifont from aur (bdf-unifont). Also, I have several tamil fonts installed. The fonts are working properly in firefox, geany and conky. But in terminal and libreoffice, its like crap. Here are the screen shots.

In firefox, the font displayed in correct manner:

And also in conky (displayed perfectly - i actually indidcated the font name in conkyrc)

In geany (also rendered correctly)

In the uxrvt now,
With font as inconsolata in .Xresources and a tamil fallback font, the result is:

and when i run

urxvt -fn "xft:TSCu_SaiIndira:pixelsize=14,style=regular"

or, set the tamil font first in .Xresources URxvt.font, I get this(see the misplaced hook and dot)

Why is this this different from the above terminal?

and here in libreoffice(also rendered incorrect - without the dot and hook)

Here are my configs:
Xresources:

!urxvt configs-----------------------
URxvt.depth: 32
URxvt.background:rgba:0000/0000/1000/eee0

!URxvt*.transparent: true
! URxvt*.shading: 0 to 99 darkens, 101 to 200 lightens
!URxvt*.shading: 15
URxvt*.scrollBar: false
URxvt.font:xft:Inconsolata:size=10,xft:TSCu_SaiIndira:size=10,xft:TAU_1_ELANGO_Barathi:size=10
URxvt.foreground: #77e5e4
!TSCu_SaiIndira and ELANGO_Barathi are tamil fonts

bashrc:

[[ $- != *i* ]] && return

alias ls='ls --color=auto'
PS1='[\u@\h \W]\$ '

[ -n "$XTERM_VERSION" ] && transset-df -a >/dev/null

export LANG="en_GB.UTF-8"

Thanks.

bohoomil · 2013-09-30 00:53:23

Could you please paste in the exact text sample just as you usually type it?

thinkanish · 2013-09-30 01:01:24

Hi bohoomil,
I don't get what you are asking. If you are asking to paste that tamil word, I didn't type it... I just copy pasted it from the browser to all other applications. By the way, I don't know how to type tamil characters (I mean I don't know the key mapings.. its somewhat difficult - 247 characters mapped onto the US keyboard)

bohoomil · 2013-09-30 01:40:42

I've assumed you speak/use Tamil, so you can share a text snippet that's causing problems. Is this mostly an aesthetic issue then? In any case, I'm soon going to upload a collection of fonts to my repo that render non-Latin scripts correctly (here is a Tamil bit: click), so you may want to try using them instead of (or next to) bdf-unifont. For URxvt you can use an additional font supporting a particular language, e.g.:

URxvt.font:xft:Envy Code R:style=Regular:pixelsize=13:hinting=False \
           xft:DotumChe:style=Regular:pixelsize=13

This should help display a piece of non-Latin text correctly.

bernarcher · 2013-09-30 01:42:41

urxvt terminals are not suited to display these fonts, unfortunately. I never got it to work with Devanagri scripts. They just don't compose the characters correctly.

Last edited by bernarcher (2013-09-30 01:45:00)

thinkanish · 2013-09-30 17:14:59

I've assumed you speak/use Tamil, so you can share a text snippet that's causing problems.

Yes , tamil is my native. What do you mean by text snippet that's causing problems? Everything is causing problems in the terminal as you can see. Also, not asthetic problem, as you can see, if the dots are misplaced, it is entirely different. Also, I am waiting for your update.

And also, someone, probably grawity or Earnestly warned me that urxvt su*ks at rendering unicode and also cannot gaurentee fallback font display. And one morething, I wanted to quote:

When I set the export LANG in .bashrc as "ta-IN" , All my GTK apps perfectly render tamil fonts (eg: GIMP, Pidgin, Geany) Perfect in the sense, their language itself is changed.. like displaying equivalent tamil word for everything you see(menus, options etc).

Jellicent · 2013-09-30 18:37:51

thinkanish wrote:

I've assumed you speak/use Tamil, so you can share a text snippet that's causing problems.
Yes , tamil is my native. What do you mean by text snippet that's causing problems? Everything is causing problems in the terminal as you can see. Also, not asthetic problem, as you can see, if the dots are misplaced, it is entirely different. Also, I am waiting for your update.
And also, someone, probably grawity or Earnestly warned me that urxvt su*ks at rendering unicode and also cannot gaurentee fallback font display. And one morething, I wanted to quote:
When I set the export LANG in .bashrc as "ta-IN" , All my GTK apps perfectly render tamil fonts (eg: GIMP, Pidgin, Geany) Perfect in the sense, their language itself is changed.. like displaying equivalent tamil word for everything you see(menus, options etc).

Have you tried using the other font bohoomil suggested? Just checking.

thinkanish · 2013-10-01 02:44:27

Jellicent: No, its not working. As he suggested, I tried Envy Code R (although it doesnot support tamil i think), it does display korean characters fine. But even If I include tamil specific fonts, It can't render. I think it needs monospaced tamil fonts to render which are not available easily.

Arch Linux

#1 2013-09-29 18:13:03

Problem with rendering tamil fonts

#2 2013-09-30 00:53:23

Re: Problem with rendering tamil fonts

#3 2013-09-30 01:01:24

Re: Problem with rendering tamil fonts

#4 2013-09-30 01:40:42

Re: Problem with rendering tamil fonts

#5 2013-09-30 01:42:41

Re: Problem with rendering tamil fonts

#6 2013-09-30 17:14:59

Re: Problem with rendering tamil fonts

#7 2013-09-30 18:37:51

Re: Problem with rendering tamil fonts

#8 2013-10-01 02:44:27

Re: Problem with rendering tamil fonts

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