Tamil Fonts
Unicode Fonts
If you find funny looking text on this blog then you probably don’t have unicode Tamil fonts (well not to mention if you don’t know Tamil, it might be funny looking anyway). All tamil text here is in unicode.After trying out different browsers and fonts, I found the best combination (i.e. clean Tamil fonts) was Firefox browser (download it and see for yourself why everyone’s switching to Firefox) and with TSCuParanar unicode font.For typing in Tamil I use this very nice Firefox extension TamilEdit. Small caveat to get it working: you have to launch TamilEdit twice (Tools->TamilEdit->Edit in Tab).
Installing fonts on Linux
This is on Fedora Core 2, GNOME desktop. To install the unicode fonts, just copy the file, TSCu_Paranar.ttf to /usr/share/fonts/tamil and type: fc-cache /usr/share/fonts/tamil.If you don’t have root privileges then just copy it into your ~/.fonts folder, and type: fc-cache ~/.fontsThat’s it. Then just open your browser and check out some of the Tamil blogs
OpenOffice
Just FYI (to save someone else of the trouble!) – after hours of trying to get Tamil unicode to work in OpenOffice (the fonts kept getting scrambled) I found that the fonts display perfectly when you set the document View to “Online Layout”. Now who would have guessed that??! Firefox 0.9.3 and OpenOffice 1.1.1 supports CTL (Complex Text Layout) very nicely – which is needed for languages where each letter gets modified by a vowel conjunction as is the case with most Indian languages (k + u = the letter ku; க் + உ = “கு” — if you see two characters inside the double quotes instead of one then you don’t have proper Tamil fonts and/or your browsers doesn’t support CTL).