Re: Tamil fonts

[समीर सिंह Sameer Singh]

How is this different from any other font that supports only part of
the script's characters?  Many Unicode blocks have "supplement" parts,
and there's nothing to assure a user that a font which supports the
representative characters will necessarily support all of the others.
Users should be prepared to deal with such problems when they happen,
and there's no way Emacs could warn them about every possible case,
since there are too many fonts out there.

Ok, so I will not mention that.

(Personally, I find it strange that a Tamil font doesn't support the
Supplement block, and even more strange that Google created a separate
font instead of extending an existing one.  Perhaps this is because
the Tamil Supplement block is relatively new.)

I think the noto guys are planning to provide merged fonts to users either as all the scripts in one font, or on a per-region basis.

See: https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-fonts/issues/2257

On Fri, Jun 3, 2022 at 6:44 PM Visuwesh <visuweshm@gmail.com> wrote:

[வெள்ளி ஜூன் 03, 2022] Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> From: समीर सिंह Sameer Singh <lumarzeli30@gmail.com>
>> Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2022 17:46:10 +0530
>> Cc: Werner LEMBERG <wl@gnu.org>, emacs-devel@gnu.org, Visuwesh <visuweshm@gmail.com>
>>
>> Great! I will send them in two different bug reports.
>
> Thanks.
>
>> I think we should also warn users that if they are trying to change the tamil font in their init.el, they should use
>> codepoints instead of the script name,
>> in the (set-fontset-font) function, because if their font does not support the supplement characters, they will
>> once more be displayed as "tofu".
>
> [...]
>
> (Personally, I find it strange that a Tamil font doesn't support the
> Supplement block, and even more strange that Google created a separate
> font instead of extending an existing one.  Perhaps this is because
> the Tamil Supplement block is relatively new.)

Probably because most of the characters added are historic, for a lack
of a better word.  I have never seen them used in practise and I doubt
most Tamil speakers know about them either: maybe if you were old, you
might have used it and/or heard about it [1].  Considering this, I don't
think most font maintainers/creators would have the supplement
characters in high priority list.

Also, these characters were added in Unicode 12.0.

[1] FWIW, even my mother did not know about it.