ttf-telugu-fonts and ttf-kannada-fonts ignored due to missing lang field in fonts.cache-1

This bug also affects the following font packages:

$ find /usr/share/fonts/truetype -name fonts.cache-1 | xargs grep -l 'lang=:'
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/openoffice/fonts.cache-1
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-kannada-fonts/fonts.cache-1
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-telugu-fonts/fonts.cache-1
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/latex-xft-fonts/fonts.cache-1

This is how Telugu text appears on a fresh install of Dapper + the ttf-indic-fonts package.

Here is how Telugu text appears after the solution described in this bug report has been applied.

This is a fixed /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-telugu-fonts/fonts.cache-1 file, which produces the correct Telugu text rendering.

Thanks a lot Suraj for the amount of information you provided. Yes ttf-indic-fonts is due for an overhaul, and I'll do it as soon as possible. Meanwhile do me a favour and alsofile a bug report against ttf-indic-fonts in Debian. Thanks a ton for all the info you digged up

I have filed the bug upstream to Debian (debbugs 370385) as you requested.

I just confirmed that this bug also affects rendering of Kannada text. Please see the attached screenshots for evidence.

= Solution =

Same procedure as before, except for Kannada language.

$ sudo sed -i.orig 's/lang=:/lang=kn:/g' /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-kannada-fonts/fonts.cache-1

Same symptoms as the incorrectly rendered Telugu text. There are missing glyphs depicted by Unicode hex boxes.

After the fix, Kannada text is correctly rendered in gedit.

Well it is apparent that somehow fc-cache doesn't find the information required to generate the appropriate fonts.cache-1 file from the fonts themselves. In my opinion we should be looking into the metadata contained in the fonts themselves

Does having a custom .fonts.conf (in the home directory) help to choose the appropriate font for Telugu and Kannada ?

It is quite possible that this issue also affects ttf-malayalam-fonts. fc-list :lang=ml says :

FreeSerif:style=Medium,navadno

I tried this .fonts.conf to force recognition of Pothana2000 font for lang=te, but it did not work.

Maybe I did not use the correct syntax; please have a look.

I agree, fixing the metadata in the fonts themselves is the best approach.

We should see how ttf-hindi-fonts define the lang= field in their metadata and update the Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam fonts accordingly.

As I have written in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HowtoFixIndicFontRendering, giving priority to Pothana2000 in ~/.fonts.conf is same as doing it in /etc/fonts/local.conf and it works (I don't know about specifying lang=te for a specific font in fonts.conf).

While I agree that Telugu fonts should be fixed to have lang=te recognised by fc-cache, I don't think that this is proper solution to the problem. This is because FreeFont one day will also fix itself to contain lang=te and then the prioritisation problem will reapper. In an ideal scenario, we will have multiple Telugu OpenType fonts on the system and we will have to have a default font set somewhere in the system. For other languages (atleast for Korean?) this has been set in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf. All Indian languages should have the default fonts set somewhere for "sans" "serif" and "monospace".

Thanks for the solution on that wiki Sunil. I have been trying to make fc-list recognize Pothana2000 for lang=te without any success. :-(

I hope you will be able to solve this whole font configuration problem. In particular, that solution fixes Telugu rendering, but what if someone wants to see both Telugu & Kannada & ...? We have to list all those fonts in that <assign> statement, no?

suraj, thank you so much for the fix - i have been looking so long for this!
now i can blog in telugu in linux http://seenu.wordpress.com

and while i'm commenting, i initially tried Sunil's solution but i must have missed something because it (setting up an /etc/fonts/local.conf file with Pothana2000 reference) didn't work for me, and removing ttf-freefont actually removes the entire ubuntu-desktop (gnome) - i learnt it the hard way:).

thanks to both of you and let's hope this gets fixed for good!

To have preference for Telugu fonts and Kannada fonts, the format is like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
 <alias>
  <family>sans-serif</family>
  <prefer>
   <family>Kedage</family>
   <family>Pothana2000</family>
  </prefer>
 </alias>
 <alias>
  <family>serif</family>
  <prefer>
   <family>Kedage</family>
   <family>Pothana2000</family>
  </prefer>
 </alias>
 <alias>
  <family>monospace</family>
  <prefer>
   <family>Kedage</family>
   <family>Pothana2000</family>
  </prefer>
 </alias>
</fontconfig>

You can have the default font set for all the language like this. Note that I have changed from <accept> to <prefer>. Somehow both work tags for Telugu and only <prefer> works for Kannada.

I found out why "lang=" is empty in the font cache file. Fontconfig assumes that a font covers a langauge only if *all* the code points in the corresponding script are covered. Pothana2000 was not covering 0C55 Unicode codepoint. I tried adding some rubbish for that codepoint and fc-cache obtained from the changed font file had lang=te.

Kedage font was not covering 2 code points: 0C8C and 0CBD.

Brilliant find, Sunil! We should relay this information to the font authors and have them fix the fonts accordingly.

Good work.

I am also facing the same problem on ubuntu 6.06.
I tried all of the above solutions, but none seem to work.

When can we expect a patch or solution to this problem.

Looks like you guys are doing gnome telugu translation. I too would like to do that.

Can you provide few pointers on how to get started on that.

Can you tell us what exactly you have tried? Because the solutions given here work for us.

PS: I shall contact you seperately about GNOME translations.

hi guys,
i tried all the methods, still telugu font rendering is problamatic in fire fox and others. see attachment.

After the suggested fixes, font rendering is little better, but it is not that good.

Any help is appriciated.

The fonts have been correcly chosen in Firefox and the problem with Freefont getting higher priority has been solved. The screenshot shows only Pothana2000 and that is the desired effect.

The reason Firefox does not show the page properly is because it has got pango rendering turned off. You can enable this by installing language support for any of the Indian languages. Try installing the Telugu langauge support.

Alternatively, you can test our problem with gedit (which does not need the Telugu langauge pack to do proper rendering).

Sunil is correct. Please see bug 48326 for details about the incorrect rendering in Firefox and the solution procedure.

New package that includes fontconfig config files hhave been uploaded to Debian. This problem should be solved when the package migrates to Ubuntu

ttf-indic-fonts 0.4.9 in Gutsy fixes this issue. Closing this bug