Thursday, February 16, 2012

Some texts are more equal then others


In #Ubuntu, the fonts for #Malayalam and several other scripts are a bit broken. As you can see in the Google+ screenshot, headers are not displayed. This is probably because the font provided by Ubuntu does not support bold or something.

Obviously, the best solution is when the fonts used by Ubuntu provide the full support applications expect. When these fonts fail as they do, it is possible to provide web fonts. Google is very much into web fonts but it seems that they have a preoccupation with the one script that is already so well supported.

It would be so cool when the people who develop fonts would concentrate their efforts where they provide the most benefit. Enabling the full functionality of a script and its associated languages on the Internet is arguably more relevant then prettifying single webpages.
Thanks,
     GerardM

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What default fonts do you have in your browser? I use DejaVu and it mostly works.

Anonymous said...

What script is Google preoccupied with?

GerardM said...

The Latin script

அ. இரவிசங்கர் | A. Ravishankar said...

What browser are your using? I have seen similar problem with Tamil in Google chrome but not in Firefox.

http://naveen-ubuntu.blogspot.in/2011/06/linux-ubutu-tamil-fonts-rendering-in.html

suggests a solution for this