One Year Old Bug Passed Away

A popular Malayalam rendering bug, known as the Karkkodakan bug, in GNOME which was active for 1 year, 2 months and 10 days was resolved last Wednesday(6th August 2008). This was the last known bug in GNOME Malayalam rendering. Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) have come with a solution some months before, but the GNOME community didn't accepted the patch since the solution was not perfect. However, SMC was maintaining patched packages for all the popular distributions, which is no longer needed. Hopefully, the next major release of Fedora and Debian shall have 100% bug free Malayalam rendering in GNOME.

The bug was basically an issue with the Pango package which caused the incorrect rendering. The technical details and discussion can be found here. The bug was reported by Praveen A, and the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing team members actively participated in providing test cases and testing. It was one of the most complicated bugs in Malayalam rendering and several people including Sayamindu, Suresh and Baiju M contributed patches. The submitted patches have several rounds of review and finally the patch submitted by Rahul Bhalero got accepted.

A special thanks to all the people who commented, tested and helped to resolve the bug.

Praveen A
Hiran V
Sayamindu Dasgupta
Ani Peter
Santhosh Thottingal
Rahul Bhalero
Behdad Esfahbod
Baiju M
Suruma
Cibu C J
Mahesh T Pai

This was an achievement of SMC, after the KDE Malayalam Translation campaign.

Even though, the bugs in GNOME are completely solved, there are still bugs reported OpenOffice.org and Qt. The complete status of Malayalam rendering issues are available here

P.S : SMC is organizing a release party at Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala on 9th and 10th August 2008 to celebrate the official inclusion of Malayalam in KDE-4.1. More details are here

Why do we need this font?

Recently I upgraded my Fedora desktop to the latest Fedora 9(Sulphur). There are several features which are worth mentioning, but I was more concerned about the Malayalam rendering issues. I have been an ardent fan of GNOME for 7 years, but this time also it disappointed me in Malayalam rendering. As an alternative I tried Konqueror(KDE-4.0.4) but still it had problems. Here is the screenshot:

But I was amazed when I removed the lohit-malayalam-fonts-2.2.1-2.fc9 which is the default Malayalam font in Fedora. See the difference here:
Even some of the Karkkodakan problem is resolved in konqueror:
I was wondering why the Fedora community is repeatedly including the buggy fonts as default, when there are better alternatives. I think, for every Malayalam user who uses Fedora 9 desktop, the first command he should learn is :

# yum remove lohit-fonts-malayalam

I think, until the pango issues are resolved, it's better to use Konqueror as the default browser.

P.S: To install Konqueror alone, just run the following command:
# yum install kdebase