Here we go ...: February 2009

Are you facing any trouble to read this blog? If you see some weird characters while reading the blog try to download and install the Malayalam Unicode fonts as follows.

For Microsoft Windows users:

Step 1: Download the latest unicode font AnjaliOldLipi and save in Windows Font (C:\WINDOWS\Fonts) folder.

Step 2: Close the browser and open it again. Now you should able to read this blog without any issues. If the issue persists verify your browser settings as follows.

INTERNET EXPLORER USERS

Start Internet Explorer

Go to: Tools> Internet Options> Fonts> Select Malayalam in Language Script> Select Anjali Old Lipi in Webpage Font

Click OK and OK.

MOZILLA FIREFOX USERS

Start Mozilla Firefox.

Go to: Tools> Options> Content> Select Anjali Old Lipi in Fonts & Colors

Click OK

GOOGLE CHROME USERS

Start Google Chrome

Click the spanner image at the right top corner and go to Options> Minor Tweaks> Change Font And Language Settings> Select Anjali Old Lipi in Fonts and Encoding

Click OK, Click Close.

For users of GNU/Linux

For Fedora, CentOS, RedHat

For Fedora 10 onwards, nothing to be done to enable Malayalam. All fonts are packaged and rendering issues are also solved.

For older versions follow these instructions : Download appropriate repo file for your computer ( Fedora 9, Fedora 8, Fedora 7, Fedora 6). Keep it in the folder /etc/yum.repos.d

Open command line/ Terminal and use the command

$yum update pango

Malayalam Fonts are available here. (To view more fonts click here).

To setup the fonts just copy it to ~/.fonts directory or open nautilus file manager and go to location (press CTRL+L and type location) fonts:/// and drag-n-drop font files to this location.
If you want it to be available to all users copy it to /usr/share/fonts.
You can check whether the fonts are installed correctly by running the command fc-list (eg. fc-list |grep Anjali ).
Restart the running applications so that the new fonts are available to them.
All applications which depend on font config will be able to use the newly installed fonts.

Font setting for Firefox browser is available at Edit->Preference->Content->Advanced. You may want to check the font settings to view the site contents. You may refer the following URLs for more information.

For Debian/Ubuntu/IT@School

For ubuntu 8.10 and above or Debian lenny and above, there is no need of installing anything separately. All fonts are packaged with them and there is no rendering bugs.

For Older versions of GNU/Linux distributions follow the below steps :

Open the file /etc/apt/sources.list and add a new line deb http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/smc/debian etch main. If you are using lenny or sid use lenny or sid instead of etch.

Open command line/ Terminal and use these commands.

# wget http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/smc/praveen.key.asc
# apt-key add praveen.key.asc
# apt-get update
# apt-get install suruma
# apt-get install ttf-malayam-fonts