വിക്കിഗ്രന്ഥശാല:Setting up your browser for Indic scripts

The Problem

Historically, computers weren't designed to display non-English text.

When computers were invented they were used only for calculating numbers, a task for which English was sufficient. As computers are being used more and more by common people for day-to-day stuff a need arose to support scripts from other languages like oriental (Chinese, Japanese, etc.), Middle East (Arabic, etc.), Indic (Malayalam,Hindi, Gujarati, etc.) and others. And people waited for the solution, until one day...

The Solution

After many messy intermediate solutions people of the world decided there needed to be a single system to write and render (display or print) all the scripts of world. The current system which is being used world wide and has become the defacto standard is called Unicode. There are many methods (Unicode Transformation Formats) used to store Unicode data and UTF-8 is the most common. This allows Unicode to be backwards compatible with ASCII - the system used to store standard English text on virtually all legacy systems.

Wikipedia is one of the heaviest users of diverse scripts since it has encyclopedias in numerous languages. It has adopted Unicode (UTF-8) as the "Encoding" for its websites... Ok this can go on forever.

The short story is, you need to have your computer setup to see web pages encoded in Unicode Indic scripts, which fortunately is getting easier everyday.

The Setup

There are 2 parts of the setup.

Having a Unicode Capable Browser
Having the Fonts

Browser

Since Unicode has gained popularity recently, If you use old browsers they might not have the capability to understand Unicode and hence they might display garbage. The developement in the Indic scene is so fast nowadays that its common to see drastic improvements between browser versions released just a couple of months apart. So you are better off getting the latest version of your web browser. The capabilities and version of your operating system might also come into play here.

OS-Specific Instructions

Mac OS X

Download Mac version Rachana Font and install it. The easiest way to install font is to copy it into ~/Library/Fonts. More details about installing fonts available here.

Apple's Safari may not render the pre-Unicode 5.1 coded (non-atomic) chillaksharangal properly. However, Firefox 3.x renders everything correctly. More details available at MacMalayalam.

Windows 10/11

Support should be built-in in newer Windows versions.
In the event that you find yourself in need of manually configuring fonts, you can do this through Control Panel->fonts.
I dont know whether the Indic fonts are installed by default or not, but similar to Mac OS X you should be able to run Windows setup CD/DVD and add the font package from there. The Devanagari font is called Mangal, the Telugu font is called Gautami, the Bengali font is called Vrinda, the Gujarati font is called Shruti, the Gurumukhi font is called Raavi, the Kannada font is called Tunga, and the Malayalam font is called Kartika (only available from XP-SP2 update).
Install ThoolikaTraditionalUnicode Font, rajana font or AnjaliOldLipi.

GNU/Linux

All beginner-friendly Linux distributions (Including but not limited to Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Zorin OS) come with Malayalam font support out of the box. However, in case you face issues, here's a list of things you might want to know

   Pango: Pango is a font rendering library that can be used by browsers like Firefox to render Indic text. Pango is in a state of continuous improvement for Indic text rendering right now. If you are having problems with badly rendered scripts (bugs with Matras for example), an outdated Pango version might be to blame.
   Firefox and other Gecko based browsers use either their native renderer or pango to render text. Pango is a better choice for redering Indic scripts but its disabled by default because pango makes the browser slightly slower. If you wish to have Pango enabled by default on Firefox, you have to compile Firefox from source with --enable-pango argument during configuration.
   If you are using a version of Firefox that came with your OS pre-installed, or are using pre-compiled binaries (if you used an app store or a software center to install firefox, this is what you are using), this support can be enabled by various means.

1. Installing a browser extension As of March 2022, there is a Firefox add-on thats render malayalam script within the browser without changes to the system. It is available in the "Add-ons for Firefox" web page.

2. Installing relevant support packs. For instance, on Ubuntu 21.10 running Gnome, typing this into a terminal window and press enter:

sudo apt install language-pack-ml language-pack-gnome-ml fonts-smc-gayathri

This will install Malayalam language support and the Malayalam font "gayathri".

3. Other browsers Konqueror is the default browser in KDE Desktop Environment. It reportedly has much better native indic script support. You may choose to switch to Konquerer in order to get this language support. This however, is an arguably more tedious task than installing language support for whichever Desktop Environment you are using.

More Info

To get more information on how to install fonts, go to this page on the Unicode organization's website. http://www.unicode.org/help/display_problems.html

Also Malayalam Wikipedia has a separate article on the same topic... you will find the content there useful too. http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Welcome%2C_newcomers

Also Kannada Wikipedia has a seperate article on the same topic... you might find the content there useful too.