Most of the regional language news websites in India have very poor compliance with UTF-8 encoding. The list includes Telugu sites like Eenadu and Sakshi, Kannada sites like Prajavani and Kannadaprabha, etc., Atleast those are the sites which I frequenty access for regional news. However, these sites do provide their own ttf (True Type Font) to make the site readable. Many of these sites do provide instructions on how to install these fonts on a windows based operating system. Sadly, none of these sites provide any support information for Unix or Mac OSX operating systems.
I got the new MacBook Pro recently and that prompted me to find the solution for these issues. Well, the solution is very simple. All you need to do is download the same ttf file each of those sites provide.
Once the download is complete, move the TTF files to ~/Library/Fonts/ folder in Mac OSX
Here is a list of TTF files along with the site information. Feel free to install and enjoy reading your choice of news in local language where ever you are!
Eenadu.net – eenadu.ttf
Sakshi.com – SW908.ttf
Kannadaprabha.com – KNWNN0NT.ttf
Other generic Telugu and Kannada fonts (these two work for most of the sites) – Pothana and kedage
Prajavani.net – Damn… I am yet to figure out how to solve this miserable site. No help available on this site what so ever! If you have a solution for this site, please feel free to share.
Similarly, for any other Indian languages including Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, etc., on Mac OS X simply download the ttf file and move it to specified folder. This should work like a charm.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the message about downloading and installing the Indian fonts.
cheers
Srini
I am looking for a Gujarati font called Ghanshyam (ghanshyam.ttf). I
have a couple of documents that use that font but I can’t read them
because I don’t have the font. The author of the docs also lost that
font in a PC crash.
I can’t use the other Guj fonts I have because the Ghanshyam font used
a non-standard mapping and as a result the docs display gibberish when
used with other fonts.
I am willing to buy the font but I can’t find it online.
If you have the font, please let me know. Or if you know of a way to
use other fonts with the document, let me know.
Thanks,
Mahendra
@Srinivasen
I am glad it was helpful to you.
You are most welcome
@Mahendra
I have no clue about that font. I will let you know if I get to know about that font.
Good Article. I agree with your article. There is no definitive, one stop solution or font standard. Thanks for this article.
This was immensely helpful….thanks a ton…finally am able to read kannadaprabha.!
Thats nice to know
Enjoy maadi!
That’s cool msg man. That works. Thank u so much
Yeah.. the above mentioned solution works for most of the browsers
You are right priya. Since I upgraded to firefox 3.5.5, even i am not able to read kannada fonts. All other f0nts display just perfect except this kannada. Need to figure out solution for that ‘FireFox’ alone now.
Yay! I am so happy that many are finding it useful.
Excellent work Mohan. Even I got macbook pro. Thanks for posting such useful info.