Malayala Manorama is using the soon to be deprecated ascii fonts. With Padma firefox extension, it should have been easier to convert it to unicode format and read. But that doesn’t help in Mac. Firefox doesn’t even recognize the font.

The problem is with the fonts, not with the browser. It doesn’t have the rules to be recognized on Mac OS. (And Mac OS doesn’t recognize the TrueType fonts written according to the Microsoft/Adobe standard.)

Safari can render unicode, but it does it in the exact order of the characters appearing in the text. Malayalam needs complex rendering, like putting puLLi on the left, combining consonant into kooTTaksharam etc. Those rules are in the font, but that is in a table not recognized by Mac OS. We need to write tables recognized by Mac OS and provide it as a free (as in freedom) implementation.

But if you are ready to spill some money, you can get a proprietery solution for this. A private enterprise is providing free/open fonts with the necessary tables. You can try it at: http://www.xenotypetech.com/malayalam_fonts.html

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