Tamil fonts use strange encoding but claim to be Unicode

[Vincent Lönngren]

DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=7.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=gutsy
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 7.10"

ttf-tamil-fonts 1:0.5.0-0ubuntu1

These fonts are reported in the hint file to be encoded with unicode, yet the actual encoding seems to be something different because the glyphs are in different positions.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Is this symptom still reproducible in 8.10 or 9.04?

[Vincent Lönngren (bice77)]

Yes. When I open them in fontforge the glyphs of these fonts seem to be in the wrong place a lot of the time - at least not in the place you'd expect with the unicode encoding.

[Kess Vargavind (kess)]

This still is true with Karmic.

All fonts TAMu_* and TSCu_* have Tamil characters in the Latin-1 Supplement block. And then more are scattered here and there. As an example, the TAMu_Kadambri font:

  0041–005A, 0061–007A, 007E–0081, 00A0–00A8, 00AA–00B6, 00B8–00C9,
  00CB–00D1, 00D6–00FF, 0152, 0153, 0160, 0161, 0178, 0192, 02C6,
  02DC, 0B83, 0B85–0B8A, 0B8E–0B90, 0B92–0B95, 0B99, 0B9A, 0B9C, 0B9E,
  0B9F, 0BA3, 0BA4, 0BA8–0BAA, 0BAE–0BB5, 0BB7–0BB9, 0BBE–0BC2,
  0BC6–0BC8, 0BCA–0BCC, 0BD7, 2013, 2014, 2018–201A, 201C–201E,
  2020–2022, 2026, 2030, 2039, 203A, 2122, 10000–10003

[Mechanical snail (replicator-snail)]

Still there in Maverick (package name apparently changed)