Wikipedia talk:Sinhala Font Guide
From Wikipedia
The Sinhala font seems to be not available. (2005-09-29) The link does not exist. Fonts.lk site has the following link. file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/gihan/My%20Documents/temp/download/Malithi%20Web.html Looks like the guy who created the page has link to the hard drive of his machine :-)
- The font problem is fixed by fonts.lk people, you can download the font now at the same page (or from this direct link). If something goes wrong in downloading (FireFox had a problem in my case), use 'save link as' instead of just clicking on the link. Greenleaf 04:39, 1 October 2005 (UTC)
The idea of having a sinhala Wikipedia is wonderful. However we've got to improve the sinhala Unicode font more. The current font (Malithi) doesn't look nice on an encyclopedic page due to incomplete pilis. It looks like a child's attempt to write Sinhala. For a serious work like an encyclopedia, this font must be complete, and I don't see any technical difficulty in improving Malithi because most things have been already done.
As a native Sinhalese speaker, I cannot be satisfied with the Unicode encoding for Sinhalese characters. Sinhalese due to its insular nature has changed a lot from other Brahmi descendant scripts such as Devanagari. So you cannot use the standard Indic Font yardstick for Sinhalese.
According to my experience I feel that having a glyph for each character with its specific modifiers (pilis) is the best. Font mapping should be similar to that of Chinese or Japanese. Such a system may be slow but at least it will display the text properly.
[edit] Unicode Editing Problem in Wikis
I'm working with Sinhala fonts for some times. The problem I have with Wiki. That is I can edit the content and it also shown in the Browser. but when I try to edit that page again, the contents in sihala shows as codes in the text editor. Is there any way to see the Sinhala unicode in the editor mode in Wiki.
- Is this problem still there? I don’t have any issues on WinXP sp2, IE6.0 - Lee 11:44, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] How about linux font installation?
How about linux font installation? Where to copy the TTF file? do I need to run mkfontdir afterwards? is that enough?
THANKS 147.8.76.26 03:24, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
- Just copy a truetype/opentype font for Windows to one of directories refered to in fontconfig configuration files (e.g. /etc/fonts/fonts.conf or /etc/fonts/local.conf or one of files in /etc/fonts/conf.d in case of Fedora)and run 'fc-cache' (as root). I'm not sure Pango does support Sinhala, though. If it does and you have an opentype font with gsub/gpos tables, it should work well (with the limitation mentioned about the application of the generic Indic script model to Sinhala script.)
[edit] Browser Recommendation
Do you guys think that the browser recommendation is still true? I think we should remove that line. Sinhala is rendered properly in IE too. - Lee 11:55, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
