Lohit Hindi Font imports wrong size characters from outside fonts

[Swarup Dev]

When using Lohit Hindi font, the punctuation -- question mark, quotatation mark, comma, period, exclamation mark -- is all imported directly from Times New Roman (i.e. the default English language font on my computer). And all that imported punctuation is too big in size. It doesn't match the font size at all. If you are typing in Hindi on a particular line, and need to use a comma or any other punctuation, the entire line will have to be moved downward in order to accommodate the larger size of the punctuation. And any time you need to write a word in English, those characters too come from Times New Roman and are too large. In addition, all this imported punctuation and roman characters are of the wrong style -- ie thickness of the lines etc. So not only the size, but the style is also off.

There are other Hindi (Devanagari) fonts in which that doesn't happen-- for example: Aksharyogini or Sarai fonts.

Lohit Hindi (Devanagari) should be set up in such a way that the punctuation and latin (English) characters are part of the character map of Lohit Hindi itself and come from within Lohit's own character set so that all the sizes and styles will match.

Someone has told me that Lohit does have most of the punctuation within its character set. But the default is set in such a way that the punctuation is taken from an outside font rather than utilizing the punctuation internal to the Lohit font. So the settings should be made in such a way that the punctuation and latin characters will all come from the internal character map of Lohit Hindi by default.

[Matt Neilson (ichthyoboy)]

changed package to ttf-indic-fonts

[Paolo Sammicheli (xdatap1)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue for you. Can you try with the latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

[Swarup Dev (dinbandhu)]

Thank you for your inquiry, this problem indeed remains an issue. It is
more a characteristic of the Lohit font itself than of the Ubuntu
release. No all the Indian fonts are like that. Some of them have all
the characters in their own charactier map. In other ways, the Lohit
font is very good and so, on this point it should also be repaired. The
Lohit font should be set up so that it pulls in characters which are of
similar size. Or alternatively and perhaps more dependable, it should
have all the characters it needs within its own character map (i.e.
punctuation characters etc), so that it will be known that the
characters are the proper size.

I have not yet installed Ubuntu 9.10, but I do not see that this issue
will change until the Lohit font's character map is fixed in the above
way.

On Sat, 2009-10-31 at 22:06 +0000, Paolo Sammicheli wrote:
> Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make
> Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been
> any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue
> for you. Can you try with the latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.
>
>
> ** Changed in: ttf-indic-fonts (Ubuntu)
> Status: New => Incomplete
>
> ** Changed in: ttf-indic-fonts (Ubuntu)
> Assignee: (unassigned) => Paolo Sammicheli (xdatap1)
>

[కోడూరి గోపాలకృష్ణ (gopalkoduri)]

This is also an issue with Lohit Telugu font. It is a beautiful font, but unusable with Latex, just because it does not have the hyphen character! Latex allows you to substitute font for characters, but not the hyphen used in hyphenation. In summary this will be a very useful enhancement to the font if done.

[Anivar Aravind (anivar)]

Lohit fonts are not updatd in ubuntu in last 2 years . Can anyone check and confirm th bug status ? I havent experienced this recently .