[smc-discuss] malayalam font

[Santhosh Thottingal]

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 1:18 PM, arjun varma <arjunthebose at gmail.com> wrote:
>> i have gone through these pages you have instructed to rad ..i have tried
>> the following fonts in linux
>
> meera,rachana,raghu,and some others ,
> i had created an web page in malayalam just to see if these fonts come out
> good. but unfortunately they dint work out.some of the letters are missing
> and are replaced by R with a a circle enclosing it.i think this may be duen
> to incompatible fonts..

This is because the data you have contains chillus written using the
encoding defined by unicode 5.1+ standard.
All the fonts mentioned above are fully compatible with Unicode 5.0.
and does not contain glyphs for the new encoding of chillus(The reason
for this is known as "atomic chillu controversy" in Malayalam, which
is another big story).
There are fonts which partially implemented unicode 5.1. see
http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:To_Read_in_Malayalam#Managing_Chillu_Characters

>can u suggest any other font to use..and also how to
> install swanalekha softwre correctly in ubuntu ..i tried it once but was
> unsuccessfull

Please give more details about the problem, such as OS version, How
did you try to install, what problem you faced etc.
Ubuntu 10.04 onwards, you need not install swanalekha separately, it
comes with default installation. You just need to add that Ibus
keyboard layouts(System->Preferences->ibus preferences) and just start
using it.

Thanks
Santhosh