I visited a website in Urdu language using Mozilla 7.1.5 and Slackware
10.0. However, the webpage which is done in unicode did not display
properly. ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/urdu ) and I think bbc.co.uk provides
downloads of Urdu fonts for windows machines only.

I thought that unicode text is standard and it should be displayed as
standard by any browser. As this is not the case, I figured out that
font for the language need to be installed. I think this should be
available on the Slackware CDs. But how to find them out and how to
install is difficult for me to guess. Somebody please help me out of
this problem.

Thanks in advance.

A.

anonymous wrote:
> I visited a website in Urdu language using Mozilla 7.1.5 and Slackware
> 10.0. However, the webpage which is done in unicode did not display
> properly. ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/urdu ) and I think bbc.co.uk provides
> downloads of Urdu fonts for windows machines only.
>
> I thought that unicode text is standard and it should be displayed as
> standard by any browser. As this is not the case, I figured out that
> font for the language need to be installed. I think this should be
> available on the Slackware CDs. But how to find them out and how to
> install is difficult for me to guess. Somebody please help me out of
> this problem.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> A.
>

Put the following in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf

<!-- Font directory list configured on Sun Sep 11 23:03:16 PDT 2005 -->

<dir>/usr/share/fonts</dir>
<dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF</dir>
<dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1</dir>
<dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/windows</dir>
<dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/</dir>
<dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/</dir>
<dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/</dir>
<dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic/</dir>
<dir>/opt/kde/share/fonts</dir>
<dir>~/.fonts</dir>

<!--

This is in order that the free type library take all the fonts into
account (even the non antialiased ones). There is a classic fontg which
support unicode (at least enough to display your site properly).

Alternatively you can install a unicode TTF font (if you have one; TTF
is the usual Windows fonts) in the following way:

Put your-font.ttf in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/myfonts (and create the
directory)

Run mkfontdir -e ../encodings/ in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/myfonts

Run mkfontscale in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/myfonts

Put the directory /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/myfonts in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf:
<dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/myfonts</dir>

Put
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/myfonts" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf (you
way want not do this last step if you want that your TTF fonts are only
visible to applications using the freetype library since TTF are usually
of bad quality if the application use standard fonts as rendred by the
server)

Run fc-cache and restart the X server

Olive

On 2006-03-30, anonymous <call_ret@yahoo.com> wrote:
[snip]
> I thought that unicode text is standard and it should be displayed as
> standard by any browser. As this is not the case, I figured out that
> font for the language need to be installed. I think this should be
> available on the Slackware CDs. But how to find them out and how to
> install is difficult for me to guess. Somebody please help me out of
> this problem.

This page might contain links that help:
http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/

It's not Slackware specific, but it might point you in the
right direction.

Carl
--
"D'you know, I don't think I've got it in me to shoot my flatmate,
my Mum, and my girlfriend all in the same evening." - Shaun of the Dead

On 30 Mar 2006 05:06:03 -0800, "anonymous" <call_ret@yahoo.com> wrote:

>I visited a website in Urdu language using Mozilla 7.1.5 and Slackware
>10.0. However, the webpage which is done in unicode did not display
>properly. ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/urdu ) and I think bbc.co.uk provides
>downloads of Urdu fonts for windows machines only.

You can use windows fonts with freetype2?

There's more to it than that, visiting the site with Opera and Firefox
under Windows: Firefox 1.5 renders properly while Opera is placing
blank 'box' (missing character glyph) frequently inside text strings,
indicating some sort of coding disagreement.

Not counting the phrases done as a graphic, are you seeing a partial
decoding with correct glyphs, or no correct text glyphs at all? (You
can tell by highlighting with mouse if a phrase is text or a graphic).

This establishes if you have the font installed, or have a decode issue.

>I thought that unicode text is standard

Firefox tells me the page is using UTF-8, yet setting Opera to UTF-8
does not improve rendering.

Grant.
--
Memory fault -- brain fried

Slackware 10 does contain some Urdu fonts, like clearlyU. So FF should
have no problem in displaying the site in question. However, you would
do well to install a few extra fonts: "Nafees Web Naskh" from
www.crulp.org and "Urdu Naskh Unicode" from
http://www.geocities.com/gsmultipublications/naskh.html. You can
install these fonts easily from KDE/Control Center. Also a good idea to
check Urdu sites (www.jang.net/urdu) in Konqueror. And see if you can
write Urdu/Arabic in Kword etc. Some help is available here:
http://geocities.com/urdutext/