Localization/Indic

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This page explains how setup your Arch installation in order to input Indic languages.

All Indic

Fonts

The following packages provide fonts for a variety of Indic scripts:

ttf-freebanglafont^AUR - Font for Bangla
ttf-indic-otf - Indic OpenType Fonts collection (containing ttf-freebanglafont), provides the character U+0CA0 "ಠ"
lohit-fonts^AUR - Indic TrueType fonts from Fedora Project (containing Oriya Fonts and more)
ttf-devanagarifonts^AUR - Devanagari TrueType fonts (contains 283 fonts)
ttf-gurmukhi-fonts_sikhnet^AUR - TrueType Gurmukhi fonts (gurbaniwebthick,prabhki)
ttf-gurmukhi_punjabi^AUR - TTF Gurmukhi / Punjabi (contains 252 fonts)
ttf-gujrati-fonts^AUR - TTF Gujarati fonts (Avantika,Gopika,Shree768)
ttf-kannada-font^AUR - Kannada, the language of Karnataka state in India
ttf-lklug^AUR - Sinhala Unicode font
ttf-tamil^AUR - Tamil Unicode fonts
ttf-urdufonts^AUR - Urdu fonts (Jameel Noori Nastaleeq (+kasheeda), Nafees Web Naskh, PDMS Saleem Quran Font) and font configuration to set Jameel Noori Nastaleeq as default font for Urdu
ttf-malayalam-fonts-meta^AUR - Meta package providing all Malayalam Unicode Fonts released by Swathanthra Malayalam Computing packaged from upstream releases.

Note: Some applications like Firefox and desktop environments will use ttf-font (ttf-dejavu, ttf-liberation, ttf-bitstream-vera, ttf-droid, gnu-free-fonts, noto-fonts, ttf-croscore, ttf-ibm-plex, etc.) by default. The gnu-free-font package does not have full support for Indic characters alignment. Thus, consider using noto-fonts over ttf-dejavu or gnu-free-fonts as a ttf-font source.

Locale

Setting up the locale will ensure that applications use appropriate localizations when available. Setup your locale by following instructions here.

Input methods

Since, keyboards with Indic layouts are extremely rare, you are likely to want to use transliteration. The following input method engines (IME) will help you accomplish this:

Avro supports phonetic input for Bangla in IBus via ibus-avro-git^AUR.
m17n project supports inscript layouts and transliteration schemes for Sanskrit, Assamese, Bengali, Burmese, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu & Tibetan amongst others. The following support input methods:
- IBus via ibus-m17n
- Fcitx via fcitx-m17n
OpenBangla Keyboard supports Bangla phonetic (Avro phonetic), Probhat, Munir Optima layout for Bangla in IBus via openbangla-keyboard^AUR.
varnam project supports transliteration for Hindi and Malayalam in IBus via libvarnam-ibus-git^AUR.

See also Input method for a list of available input-method frameworks.

Sinhalese

This section describes how to get Sinhalese Unicode support and Sinhalese Unicode input to work using IBus (sayura-ibus) or scim (sayura-scim).

Fonts

For Sinhala support, you can install any of these fonts:

noto-fonts - Noto Sans Sinhala, a sans serif font.
gnu-free-fonts - FreeSerif, a serif font.
ttf-lklug^AUR - LKLUG, a serif font.

Guide to install Sinhala Unicode Font

Download http://sinhala.sourceforge.net/files/lklug.ttf and place it in /usr/share/fonts.

Then Run the following command

fc-cache -fv

And proceed to the below steps..

Locale

Edit /etc/locale.gen. Uncomment following line

si_LK UTF-8

Run following program

locale-gen

Immediately you will be able to read Sinhala Unicode in your programs (If not You may need to restart the relavent programs. eg: Firefox)

Input methods

iBus

For Sinhala support on ibus install the following package

ibus-m17n - M17N engine for IBus

Logout from the current session and log in again after installing. After that, Sinhala input methods should be available on input method configuration panel.

FCITX

The only packaged fcitx based input method for Sinhalese is fcitx-sayura for Fcitx.

While there are also ibus-sayura and scim-sayura, they are no longer in the AUR (albeit they can still be found in the AUR archive).