Ravi asks:

Hello Michael,

I am a regular reader of your blog and I find it very entertaining and informative.

My problem is this: Gautami font in XP and Vista is absolute crap for reading Telugu documents on the web. You previously had a post comparing Gautami with other Telugu fonts on the web and how crappy it is even to untrained eyes.

I am trying to find a way to set the font preferences in Windows so that Windows would use my font (the free Vemana or Pothana2000 unicode fonts). The only way I could avoid Gautami is by deleting it from the fonts. Is there another way? In Linux you could define a custom fontconfig file to override the settings. Is there a Windows equivalent?

Thanks,

Ravi

(I'll talk about the issues here related to UI vs. document fonts in another post soon!)

Unfortunately, there are only two paths one can take here -- either one can use the existing font fallback logic in Uniscribe, Or one can do one's own fallback.

I talked to some people over here like Nick and Simon, and the only other option (which is not very feasible in the long run) is to replace the font with one that has the exact same name. But doing this leads to all kinds of other problems, as you might be able to imagine (even before you get into the whole unsupported configuration and potential legal issues that could arise here related to licensing and design trademarks.

Sorry about that. ;-(

Now for fonts on the web one can change one's font choice for the script in order to see web pages using Telugu with whatever font they choose. This might work around the limitation quite effectively!

 

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