[XeTeX] FreeSerif not working for me in Devanagari

[Steve White]

Hi Sriramana (et al.),

On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 7:42 AM, Shriramana Sharma <samjnaa at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I hope I'm not wrong but the FreeSerif Devanagari glyphs seem to be
> derived from Lohit Devanagari (https://fedorahosted.org/lohit/).
>
FreeSerif's current Devanagari glyphs are based on the Velthuis TeX font.
   http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/ps-type1/indic

The current version was released in May of this year.  It takes some
time for software changes to reach the distributions, though.

Try out the FreeFont version from earlier this year, dated 20120503:
    http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/freefont/

Some info on that release:
    https://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=7216
Please read the installation notes in the package, if you decide to try it out.

The documentation for earlier versions of FreeSerif says that glyphs
had been drawn from those of the Indix, Indlinux, and Bharatbhasha
projects.  I don't know what connection those might have with the
Lohit project.

FreeSans' current Devanagari glyphs are based on those of the Gargi font
    http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/gargi/ .
(FreeSans is heavily altered, and also has a bold version.)

> I have had problems with FreeSerif on LibreOffice also.

LibreOffice recently fixed some bugs with their Indic rendering code,
that have indeed caused problems in the past (but not just with
FreeSerif).  My impression is that the Devanagari is working well in
the LibreOffice versions of recent updates to the Ubuntu distribution,
anyway.

> IMHO it is
> better to use DejaVu for European scripts and Lohit family for Indic
> scripts. I am not saying that the Lohit family is perfect, but the
> maintainers are very responsive to bug reports. So you might try and
> see whether the Lohit fonts are better suited to your requirements.
>
DejaVu is a very fine set of typefaces, and a great open-source effort.
For many purposes, and tastes, it may be just the face to use.
However, the style of DejaVu's Latin face is very different from that
of FreeFont.
For many purposes and tastes, FreeSerif may be preferable.
It's a good thing we have options!

The FreeFont maintainer is also pretty responsive to bug reports.
Give him a try!
     https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=freefont

One problem is outstanding with Devanagari on Windows 7 and Vista (not
on XP). This is currently being researched.  But on Linux, no new
problems have been reported.

Cheers!