[TYPO3-UG India] Strange problem with Tamil in GMENUs

[Christian Lerrahn]

Hi,
the messages below have been posted on typo3-english before. However,
as this concerns an Indian language, I decided I'd try my luck here,
too. Anybody had this problem (an ImageMagick bug(?)) before and solved
it?

Cheers,
Christian

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?

EDIT: 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