[TYPO3] Strange problem with UTF-8 menus

[Christian Lerrahn]

Hi,
> I'm trying to set up a site in Tamil but am having strange problems
> with the graphical menus. I can't read Tamil but the editor tells me
> that while he sees page titles correctly in the backend, they show up
> wrongly in the frontend menus. When we use a non-UTF-8 font, we can
> get correct menus. However, then the page titles will be wrong in the
> HTML because they need to be UTF-8 there.
> The problem seems to be that letters get swapped around. According to
> my understanding from studying websites about the Tamil alphabet these
> 2 letters actually form a kind of unit together. I can copy the
> combination தே in here but when I try to delete the second of the 2
> letters, it actually deletes the first (probably because the first one
> can't stand on its own).
> What I conclude is happening is that ImageMagick is mirroring this
> letter from the font file. However, I don't really understand why it
> would do that and even less why it would not do it in a regional
> encoding instead of UTF-8.
> Has anybody ever run into the kind of problem and has a hint for me?

I've now tried the same directly via ImageMagick and I get the same
effect.

convert -background lightblue -fill blue
-font /usr/share/fonts/tamil/TAMu_Kadampari.ttf  -size 165x70 -encoding
utf8 -gravity center label:தே  label_gravity.gif

will result in the 2 letters of the string being swapped. However, as I
have now learned from someone who speaks Tamil, the (originally) first
letter is now modifying the meaning of the third letter. I've tried
that on 2 different systems with IM 6.4.0.6 and 6.3.7.9. Does anybody
know if it is possible to fix this in IM? I'll also try the IM
mailing list (if there happens to be one).

Cheers,
Christian