Ever since I moved away from the other Operating System (a.k.a. Microsoft Windows), there have been many hours spent searching for Kannada fonts – on both Linux and Macintosh. I had satisfactory amount of success on Linux in this regard with hatch-patch approaches. The release of KannadaLaTeX (which has the most sensible transliteration rules by far – in my opinion), put almost all my worries were put to rest – at least with regard to producing elegant looking (non-web) documents. However, native typesetting for web platforms as well as reading such documents in Firefox was far from satisfactory.
It has been couple years since I started using Apple Macintosh and the search for such native typesetting and reading continued. A bit of Google!ing, I found Nicholas Shank’s page. The instructions given there were pretty simple and straight forward. Although the end result in Firefox was still quite far from satisfactory (appearance similar to that in Linux), Safari produced an output that I pretty much completely ended all my search. For your viewing pleasure, below are the before and after … for Firefox and Safari.
Kannada & Firefox
Kannada & Safari
Apparently, there is something missing in Firefox and His Steveness (and co) have taken care of it in Safari. That makes it one less reason for using a virtual (Parallels) instance of the other OS on my Mac!
Have you tried Firefox 3 beta?
@HPN:
Do you believe Firefox 3 supports Kannada better? I will give it a try this weekend – thanks for pointing it out :)
@Note2Self:
Kannada looks as it should – very elegant and easily readable – in Firefox 3 (on Mac OS X)