Unicode fonts are the best for publishing Malayalam (my native language) content on the web. But many of the popular regional sites such as Malayala Manorama and Deepika still use custom fonts which works on ISO encoding.

In Windows, these fonts are automatically supported. When it comes to Ubuntu, what you see is a jumbled set of characters. Following set of instructions will help you reading Deepika in firefox. Follow a similar procedure for other sites.

1. Install the custom font. For Deekipa, Malayalam font can be downloaded from http://www.deepika.com/font.htm. Download this to a folder and then using terminal go to the folder. Now copy the font to /usr/share/fonts,

sudo cp mlkr0ntt_TTF.ttf /usr/share/fonts

2. Refresh the Ubuntu font cache. For that run the following command,

sudo fc-cache -fv

3. Close all firefox sessions and reopen firefox. Go to www.deepika.com. Now from the firefox menu select the following,

View => Character Encoding => Western (ISO-8859-1)

Now you should be able to see some Malayalam characters!

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Howtos, Linux, Software, Tech. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.