Removing Tamil translation from CLI packages due to rendering issues

[kbdharun]

Hi @TamilNeram, thanks for translating the newly added strings for our components. It's nice to see someone doing a lot of dedicated translations for Tamil (pretty impressive Weblate account you got there).

I do Tamil translations myself and manage overall translations for the Vanilla OS project, so just want to bring this issue to your notice.

When Tamil (and other Indic) characters are rendered on Linux and other OSes regardless of the terminal you use, the font will either be squashed together or the character spacing will not be proper (leading to the string becoming unreadable). See the below image for reference:

I have been trying to advocate for this issue to be fixed in multiple places over the years. Unfortunately, due to the ligature of the alphabets it's difficult to render Tamil and other Indic characters on the terminal and workarounds seem to break rendering for other languages.

For these reasons, I will have to remove your translated version of ABRoot strings. I noticed that you have created new translations for Apx and VSO (which is empty atm) which are CLI components too so they will experience the same issue, I will remove them too. Sorry for the inconvenience and once again thanks for your work.

In future when translating other projects to Tamil I would suggest skipping command line applications since it will cause readability and accessibility issues to the end user. If possible, you can check also your historical contributions and remove Tamil translations from tools which are CLI based.

[nitamil]

Hi team,
Thanks for sharing the details. To fix this issue, I have a workaround solution. We can convert the messages to TACE16 encoding.
and use one of the TAC fonts. I have done this personally on Windows and Linux OS (Ubuntu) it works fine.

Let me know your thoughts.

Regards
Tamil Time Team.

[kbdharun]

Interesting is there a guide or documentation on using it? (or if possible can you share the steps and fonts link with me?)

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While we can't ship it by default in Vanilla OS (since we use only Noto fonts due to space constraints), if someone enquires about this in future I will reference your suggestion.

[TamilNeram]

I saw the image you shared in this thread once again. The Unicode fonts are rendering correctly, but the only problem is the minimum font size for console is too small for the Tamil alphabets, so the fonts overlap. Can try setting the font size of the console to 16 or above, and see if the issue goes away or not?

When the Unicode fonts are not rendered properly (e.g. without engine - ழ ் ; with engine - ழ்), then TACE fonts are more useful. There are lots of advantages going with TACE, one of them is no rendering engine is required for showing 216 Tamil characters (uyirmei ezhuthukkal). Other major advantage is, the size of the document is reduced by approximately by 1/3 or 1/2 based on the number of combinational characters present in the document.

The below links are for TACE encoding and the available tools.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_All_Character_Encoding - Details of encoding

https://www.tamilvu.org/en/Tamil-Keyboard-interfaces-fonts - From this website you will find the TAC16 Fonts.

https://www.iniyatamil.com/Downloads - This tool helps to convert the UTF8/16 encoded files to Tac16 encoding.