[XeTeX] Tamil unicode character not displaying correctly

[Zdenek Wagner]

2014-02-27 15:15 GMT+01:00 dsv <ojdfpiv at gmail.com>:
> I uninstalled whatever tex I had obtained via the Synaptic Package Manager
> and installed the latest version from the tug.org website. The problem I had
> been facing disappeared! Thanks for the tips.
>
> I don't know who maintains texlive in the Ubuntu repository. I would be
> instructive to upgrade that to the latest version as many people I know use
> a package manager (apt-get or Synaptic) to install software. If Ubuntu says
> that I have the latest version of a certain software, I tend to believe it.
> In this case, that was disproved.
>
With any Linux distro you never have the latest versions of anything.
They only differ in how old versions you have. It has several reasons.
Maintainers of distros verify stability and security, they do not
include untested versions. And the second reason is time. It always
needs some work to package it and thus time is needed. TeX is very
complex, packaging TeX Live is not an easy task. For most users old
version of TeX Live is good enough but the support of Indick scripts
and languages is quite new, thus for users of Indic scripts having the
latest version is important. Ubuntu certainly has bugzilla where you
can report issues.
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 10:04 PM, Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> 2014-02-26 17:17 GMT+01:00 dsv <ojdfpiv at gmail.com>:
>> > Thanks Zdenek. I am using the same font in Ubuntu and Windows. It is
>> > called
>> > "Lohit Tamil". Both Ubuntu and Cygwin seem to be running the same
>> > version of
>> > xetex - 3.1415926. The sub-version seems a little different. However, I
>> > don't know how to ensure that the same exact version of xelatex is
>> > running
>> > on both Cygwin and Ubuntu. I used the setup manager on Cygwin which
>> > offers
>> > only one version; on Ubuntu I used the Synaptic package manager.
>> >
>> 3.1415926 is version of TeX, not XeTeX. The TeX version converges to
>> \pi. Whenever D. E. Knuth fixes a bug, another digit is added. The
>> number after the hyphen denotes the version of the engine. You can
>> immediatelly see in the parenthesis, that in Cygwin you use the latest
>> official version from TeX Live 2013 while in Ubuntu you use a very old
>> version from TeX Live 2009. Harfbuzz was added in 2013 so it is
>> natural that it is not mentioned in that old version. You should first
>> upgrade your TeX in Ubuntu. If new deb packages are not available, it
>> is possible to install TeX Live directly from www.tug.org and you can
>> always keep it up-to-date no matter whether it is supplied in Ubuntu
>> or not. No one is going to fix bugs in 5 years old XeTeX.
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz