Friday, January 19, 2007

How to display Malayalam properly in Firefox

In the "raw" setting of Firefox, it is sometimes difficult to read Malayalam properly. The difficulties faced are:
1. Improper representation of characters, ie characters are not joined, the dotted circle is displayed etc etc
2. Cils are not displayed.
This problem can be solved by Publishers by taking the following into consideration:
1. Avoiding justify:center
2. Avoiding line-spacing
3. Hard coding font name to a Malayalam unicode font.

As we cannot expect all the publishers to follow these, the users have the following options:
1. Use the stylish extension
2. Override the style of the publisher
An example to override the style ( MSN India Malayalam )
Use stylish and Write Style for msn.co.in..
Just fill the following in the bold inside the curly brackets:
@-moz-document domain("msn.co.in") {
p, a, ul, .showit,.centerinnercontenta, .fontash { font-family:Rachana_w01 ! important ;}
}
You can enable n disable the override using the extension.

Majority of the problems will be solved by this method. Some remaining problems can be solved only by userscripts, and greasemonkey extension can be helpful at this stage.


Tuesday, January 16, 2007

An open request to Blogger

I tried in vain to report the malayalam data problem in the NEW blogger.
Only the consonants of Malayalam are SAVED properly , rest is saved in numbers as ചAmpersandHash3391semicolonAmpersandHash3405semicolon‍
കളAmpersandHash3405semicolon‍AmpersandHash8205semicolon‍
Substitute semicolon‍ with ; , Ampersand with & , Hash with # .
It is supposed to be saved as ചിന്തകള്‍. The OLD blogger save it correctly.
[To understand what I mean , please view the SOURCE of the blog !]

I posted this problem in some "support" groups, reported to blogger "support".. no response yet.
Why I post it here then ? I don't know.