[mapserver-users] Rendering Hindi Characters

[Stephen Woodbridge]

On 1/23/2013 2:20 PM, Peter Mallen wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
>
> I am having issues rendering certain Hindi characters. I am using UTF-8
> encoding.
>
> When attempting to display the following Hindi character in MapServer: र्ट
>
> It is rendered in MapServer as the following two characters: र् ट
>
> I believe these characters form what is called a conjunct consonant, of
> which there appear to be thousands of and most of them do not render
> using MapServer.
>
> Also, It appears that MapServer is having an issue displaying these
> conjunct consonants and wants to display these characters separately
> rather than to form them as one combined character.
>
> Here is a link describing more about the Devanagari alphabet:
> http://www.omniglot.com/writing/devanagari.htm
>
> Can anyone please help with this?
>
> Thank You,
>
> Peter Mallen

Hi Peter,

I can not speak to this specific problem but I can give you and 
overview. Mapserver uses fribidi library for rending this data and I 
know from working with Arabic that a lot depends on the font you are 
using, in additional to the capabilities and version of fribidi library.

This kind of question is probably best asked on the fribidi list as they 
will know more about what is supported or not for any given language and 
they might be able to point you to a better font.

http://www.fribidi.org/

You should probably make sure you are using a recent version of the 
library like 0.19.2 or better and be aware the 0.19.5 was released in 
Dec 2012.

Hope this helps,
   -Steve W