[Debian-in-workers] Errors in Lohit Tamil font and its rendering in Kubuntu 8.04 (Hardy)

[R (Chandra) Chandrasekhar]

Dear Folks,

I am writing to inform you of errors that I have discovered in the rendering of 
the "sh" and "shrI" characters in Lohit Tamil fonts bundled in K/Ubuntu, which I 
have been using.

I do not know who the font designers are, so I am filing this bug report with 
you as maintainers of the original Debian package

ttf-indic-fonts

which I believe contributes to the Ubuntu package

ttf-indic-fonts-core.

Firstly, the package mostly works well; congratulations for that.

The specific errors for the Lohit Tamil font are these:

1. The ITRANS Tamil character "sh" in Lohit Tamil is rendered as ஶ் : the dot 
above or pulli should be over the character rather than beside it. Most other 
consonants are rendered correctly. For example, the consonant "k" is correctly 
rendered as க். I have been told that the "font must have a correct GPOS table 
for pulli positioning and the rendering engine must utilise that information 
when drawing the glyph" for the character to show up correctly. Of the two, I 
think it more likely that it is the font rather than the rendering system that 
is likely to be faulty because க் shows up correctly.

2. The character "shrI" should properly be rendered as ஸ்ரீ. This character should 
correctly be Unicode 0BB6 + 0BCD + 0BB0 + 0BC0 whereas in Lohit Tamil (and 
possibly other Tamil fonts) it is made from Unicode 0BB8 + 0BCD + 0BB0 + 0BC0, 
which is wrong. This should be corrected to accord with "The Unicode Standard, 
Revision 5.0", p 325.

If this is the wrong list to send my email to, please let me know where to send 
it. If you need me to file a Launchpad bug, kindly advise me as well.

Many thanks.

Chandra
10 Jun 08
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Dr R (Chandra) Chandrasekhar
Adjunct Senior Lecturer
M018, Centre for Intelligent Information Processing Systems (CIIPS)
School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering
The University of Western Australia
35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, AUSTRALIA
Office: +61-(8)-6488-3856  Fax: +61-(8)-6488-1168
email: chandra at ee.uwa.edu.au  web: http://www.ee.uwa.edu.au/~chandra/
CRICOS Provider Code: 00126G
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