Viewing Non-Unicode Indic Language Web Sites

A good number of Indic language web sites have not yet converted to Unicode, but still require custom fonts and are designed to work only with special dynamic font support available in the Windows IE browser. Viewing them on a Mac can be tedious, since you have to find and install the font used by the site and then hope a Mac browser will recognize it. An easier alternative is to download the Padma Extension for FireFox from this page:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/873/

It is supposed to provide support for display of non-Unicode Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil, Devanagari, Gujarati, Bengali, and Gurmukhi.

The Perils of PDF

Anyone who has tried to work with PDF files whose content includes complex scripts has probably noticed that copy/paste and searching rarely if ever work. For those interested in this problem, here are five useful blog posts with comments that discuss this, with examples from Tamil:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/07/06/10031112.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/07/16/10038461.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/09/06/10057561.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/09/16/10062966.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/09/29/10069077.aspx

Viewing Hindi, Tamil, Bengali Websites with Your iPad/iPhone/iPod

Apple's mobile devices are in general still unable to correctly display Unicode Indic scripts like Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and Tibetan. But it turns that the Opera Mini browser can solve that problem for web pages by turning the text into a graphic. To activate this feature, you have to type opera:config in the browser address window. A page of settings will then come up, and you go to the very bottom one called "Use Bitmap Fonts for Complex Scripts", set that to Yes, and hit the Save button.

Unicode Bug in Pages

In an earlier article I mentioned some fonts are now available for the new scripts in Unicode 5.1. If you try to use these in Pages (or Keynote or iWeb), you may find that they do not work. For some reason the text engine in these apps does not allow direct input of characters not included in the Unicode version embodied in the OS -- i.e. characters which do not have a name when you select them in the Character Palette.

Strangely, this bug only affects characters in the Unicode BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane) -- direct input of those at U+10000 and up is not a problem.

A workaround is to compose in TextEdit (or another app) and copy/paste into Pages.

Another bug is the apparent inability to input ZWJ and ZWNJ in Pages. These characters are required for correct encoding of some languages using the Arabic, Tamil, and Devanagari scripts.