Tamil text appears incorrect, regardless of font

[carlhiggs]

The appearance of glyphs for Tamil using fpdf2 is incorrect. Apparently this relates to a currently known bug (March 2022) for fpdf2
py-pdf/fpdf2#365

In the case of Tamil, சென்னை, இந்தியா appears as

and if you select the text in the above PDF and paste it elsewhere (like in this post above), it appears correct.

Apparently it relates to the way 'devaganari conjuncts' are represented. But its very annoying for our Tamil reports.

[Lucas-C]

Hi, I'm the maintainer of fpdf2.

As explained in issue #365 by @gmischler, this is not a trivial problem to solve. While PRs solving this would be very welcome, I cannot personnaly ensure this issue will be closed soon.

Instead of fpdf2, have you considered using borb maybe? I haven't tested if it can render Hindi or Tamil text properly, but knowing how @jorisschellekens did an excellent work on writing it, I'd say that this is very likely😊

[carlhiggs]

Hi @Lucas-C , thank you for the update on this issue; I appreciate it! I had a brief look at borb when I started this project, although I ultimately used fpdf2 -- its good to know this could be a solution. I'll check it out later.

For now I found a manual work around for my purposes, by opening the resulting Tamil-language PDF in Adobe Acrobat and manually correcting the sections as required. Not an ideal solution, but it meant we could meet this current project's publication deadline.

If I am able to later find a way to get this work using fpdf2, I'll be sure to make a pull request and let you know!