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All the terminal fonts I have tried result in inaccurate rendering of the Devanagari sript (and/or Roman script) in the Terminal

In the Devanagari script, a vowel binds itself to a preceding consonant. This type of vowel does not exist on its own. The dotted circle indicates that it requires a preceding consonant...
Here is an example of an as yet unattached vowel: VOWEL SIGN O'

Proper font rendering does the work of grafting the consonanat to the vowel, and should remove all visible signs of the dotted-circle....

...but I can't find a Terminal font which renders both the Roman script and Devanagari scripts satisfactorily. Actually, the dotted-circle still shows for ALL Devanagari fonts, and the Roman script is not rendered properly for many of those fonts; eg. in the word "Primer", about 40% of the "e" overlaps the "m".

Is there some way around this?
Does anyone know of a suitable font?... Mono-spaced is preferred.
Or is it something to do with the Ubuntu - gnome-terminal setup?

Update 2:
I tried the same text in openSUSE (gnome-terminal): it failed worse than Ubuntu.
I tried the same text in Fedora (Konsole): it rendered PERFECTLY!
but that's Fedora, and I'm using Ubuntu :(
okay, then next obvious step:
I installed Konsole in Ubuntu: it rendered PERFECTLY!
but that's Konsole, and I'd rather stay in the gnome family... and Konsle's menu doesn't respond to keyboard... and If Ubuntu+Konsole can do it, then there is probably a way Ubuntu+gnome-terminal can...

Update 1:
As suggeseted, here are some examples.
The Devanagari looks okay here, but not in the termainal (the .png below shows the Monospace font)

30 - Uncle moon – चंदा मामा/20081119 Hindi Primer part 30 - Uncle moon – चंदा मामा.nag
31 - Rain Queen - वर्षा रानी/20081124 Hindi Primer part 31 - Rain Queen - वर्षा रानी.nag

alt text

Actually, NONE of the Devanagari-aware fonts render correctly!
...and some of the the Roman script rendering can get pretty whacky.

All entries from the command $ locale are set to "en_AU.UTF-8", but even setting everything to "hi_IN.UTF-8" makes no difference

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  • 2
    Could you add some real-world sample text in Devanagari script so that people can try out different fonts they may have? Oct 20, 2010 at 16:21
  • 1
    There's some preliminary work been done on adding devanagari to the Ubuntu font family, so there's a chance this will work better in future: design.canonical.com/2010/09/charactersets
    – misterben
    Oct 21, 2010 at 19:27

2 Answers 2

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I reckon that this is a bug, and is beyond a simple "choose a better font" issue.

The same fonts, including the default Monospace, work fine in all other apps I've tried.
and Devanagari fonts doesn't render properly in Fedora's gnome-terminal either, but the same fonts works in KDE's Konsole and also in Konsole running in Ubuntu.

I don't know how to follow a reported and accepted bug, but I found a reference to a gnome-terminal / Devanagari issue (from December of 2008)... and perhaps this is the same issue.

vte (Ubuntu) low (priority) Assigned to: Ubuntu Desktop Bugs
https://bugs.launchpad.net/vte/+bug/310053

...and now that I've played with Konsole a bit more, it has revealed some really nice features... especially Search Output with Regex... wow! Just what I wanted... and the lack of menu-accelerator Keys don't matter, becaue it has fully Kustomizable short-cut Keys... I'm Konverted.... and I've found my good mono-space font. It is called Monospace :)

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In case of GNOME Terminal (VTE) the problem was not the font; the problem was that VTE used to render each cell independently, including a Devanagari spacing combining mark separately from the base letter. This was fixed in VTE version 0.56.

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  • I am still facing the issue, even with Google Noto fonts with gnome-terminal. In GUI everything works fine.
    – coda
    Sep 9, 2020 at 16:03

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