The only thing which is troubling me with Dapper is some bug with Firefox and Thunderbird. I check many Urdu websites each day, particularly blogs and BBC Urdu. There are two most popular Urdu fonts Nafees Web Naskh and Urdu Naskh Asiatype. Unfortunately Firefox, Thunderbird and Epiphany are unable to display these fonts. Instead pages are displayed first in sans-serif and after installing Tahoma, pages start appearing in Tahoma.
I tried my best to resolve this issue but nothing worked out. I filed a bug report and a support request (both unanswered till yet). If any one of you is facing this bug please add your comments on either my bug report or support request.
Konqueror and Galeon are two browsers that render web pages properly. Konqueror is just too advance for me. I liked Galeon which is simple and good. I still have to figure out some way to use alternate application for mail and news reader.
Ali, the bug is not related to the localization of Ubuntu or any of its components. The bug lies somewhere in mozilla’s Gecko and libpango package. It only restricts firefox to ignore urdu fonts other applications in Ubuntu work fine with Urdu. Konqueror works great with urdu and my current default browser Galeon also renders urdu fonts properly. We have also filed a bug report on Mozilla’s Bugzilla Bug #321952
Also, there is a known issue in the Dapper release notes: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/releasenotes/606
“Installations from the Desktop CD in languages that do not have “.UTF-8″ in their locale code (Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Northern Sami, Persian, Punjabi, Vietnamese, Wolof) may incorrectly display English text where localised text should be available.”
Could this be the reason why Urdu is not being rendered properly? There is already a “low urgency” bug report filed under bug report number 47742
H’lo Noumaan,
Take a look at http://www.fossfp.org/ullpdownloads. I have not tried Urdu localisation in Ubuntu myself, so can’t say whether this will be of any help to you or not, but it’s worth a shot.