[Debian-in-workers] Bug#661905: Rachana Malayalam font has wrong glyphs for many characters

[Shriramana Sharma]

Package: ttf-malayalam-fonts
Version: 1:0.5.14

The Rachana Malayalam font that is distributed with Debian has wrong
glyphs for many characters.

I have separately reported the bug #661898 that this font also gives
false mappings for non-encoded characters, displaying for them a glyph
which looks like 00AE REGISTERED SIGN ®. The same is true for many
encoded characters also. Specifically the following characters are
displayed as ®:

Sanskrit-use characters:
0D44 MALAYALAM VOWEL SIGN VOCALIC RR
0D62 MALAYALAM VOWEL SIGN VOCALIC L
0D63 MALAYALAM VOWEL SIGN VOCALIC LL

Pedantic-use characters:
0D29 MALAYALAM LETTER NNNA
0D3A MALAYALAM LETTER TTTA

Old dot reph:
0D4E MALAYALAM LETTER DOT REPH

Numerals and fractions:
0D71 MALAYALAM NUMBER ONE HUNDRED
0D72 MALAYALAM NUMBER ONE THOUSAND
0D73 MALAYALAM FRACTION ONE QUARTER
0D74 MALAYALAM FRACTION ONE HALF
0D75 MALAYALAM FRACTION THREE QUARTERS

Date mark:
0D79 MALAYALAM DATE MARK

Chillu characters:
0D7A MALAYALAM LETTER CHILLU NN
0D7B MALAYALAM LETTER CHILLU N
0D7C MALAYALAM LETTER CHILLU RR
0D7D MALAYALAM LETTER CHILLU L
0D7E MALAYALAM LETTER CHILLU LL
0D7F MALAYALAM LETTER CHILLU K

The following character is displayed as a fullstop ".": 0D70 MALAYALAM
NUMBER TEN

Many of these characters were encoded after the initial publication of
this font. As such, bug #661898 regarding non-encoded characters would
have applied before, but now that these characters are encoded, either
the font should provide the proper glyphs or should not provide any
mappings for these characters at all.

It is not appropriate for a font in a distribution to have encoded
characters mapped to the wrong glyph. If the font does not provide a
glyph for a character, the rendering engine will automatically take
care of such characters and display them using the .notdef glyph in
the font. Providing such wrong mappings fools the rendering engine to
think that the font actually caters to these characters which is not
right. Therefore please either provide the correct glyphs or remove
these mappings.

Seeing Santosh's feedback on the bug #661898, I have now downloaded
the latest repo version of the Rachana font. I see that the bad glyphs
have been removed. But this bug should be closed *after* that version
is released just to keep track of things.

--
Shriramana Sharma