[Debian-in-workers] Bug#523388: Bug#523388: Hindi font rendering

[Kapil Hari Paranjape]

Hello,

On Thu, 16 Apr 2009, Ritesh Raj Sarraf wrote:
> Because Konqueror can render indic 
> fonts pretty good. So can many of the KDE text editors.

This indicates that some applications _can_ render the fonts
correctly and so the problem is not with the fonts.

> From what I understood till now about fonts, I guess this problem is specific 
> to the way terminal fonts are rendered.

There are some problems with the way terminals work which makes it
difficult to fix the problem. Roughly speaking, to render indic fonts
correctly, the terminal would have to re-draw each line each time a
character is input. There are some patches to "mlterm" to do this but
these are not enabled by default.

It is easier for browsers since these render the entire page and there
is no re-drawing required. I am not sure how the recent emacs handles
this (it does indic fonts correctly).

> So, I'm not very sure where this bug relates to.

Some would say (blasphemously) that is a bug in the Indic scripts
which are not well suited to such use.

> How is it with other localized (non-indic) languages ?

The problem is mainly with Indic scripts but I think it also occurs
with a some other Asian languages.

> Note: The same localized text, on Linux's VT, is completely garbled. It just 
> shows a bunch of white square boxes.

Try to use bglterm. It will display text "correctly".

The bug is not with Indic fonts package. The purpose of the font
packages is to correctly provide glyphs for various unicode
(wide-)chars as specified by the Unicode definitions. The rest of the
work is the job of applications and libraries.

Regards,

Kapil.
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