Malayalam's last major rendering issue in Pango and the workaround

[Baiju M <baiju muthukadan net>]

Hi all,

      This is about a bug in Pango related to Malayalam (ml_IN)
rendering.  The bug no. 441654 [1] was submitted almost a year back
now.  A workaround for that bug was submitted and tested.  Others has
made sure that this temporary fix is not affecting other Indic
languages also.  Details about a proper solution was suggested
recently, but no one has come forward with an implementation.  So, on
behalf of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing community [2] I would
request you to accept the patch as a temporary solution.  We can still
keep the bug open until it is fixed properly.

Malayalam is a language officially supported by GNOME for last two
releases (more that 80% translation).  This is the last major
rendering issue remaining in GTK+ and so GNOME.  GNOME is used in
Kerala state schools [3] with the patches provided by SMC team (a
custom Debian based distro).  So, if we have this hack accepted, it
would be easy to switch to standard distributions without any patches.

[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=441654
[2] http://smc.org.in/
    http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/smc/
[3] http://www.education.kerala.gov.in/eng_infortec.htm

Regards,
Baiju M