Tip to properly render and read Indian language websites in GNU/Linux

Yahoo India has been on a drive to localize its web content. The result being a series of portals in a multitude of Indian languages which includes Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi, Gujarati and so on. And it has made it easier for the visitors to view the website in the Indian language of their choice by using the web address format as follows - which is :

http://in.yourlanguage.yahoo.com/

Suppose your mother tongue is Tamil, you can view the Yahoo India web page content in Tamil by typing the address 'http://in.tamil.yahoo.com/'. Cool isn't it ?

Fig: This is how the website rendered before Indic fonts were installed

But while viewing the website rendered in the Indian languages, I was not able to read the content as the relevant Indian fonts were missing on my machine. After some search, I found that there is a package containing a variety of Indian language fonts available for Linux. They are popularly known as Indic fonts.

Fig: Website after indic fonts were installed

If you are using a Debian based Linux distribution, you can easily install the fonts via the command :

# apt-get install ttf-indic-fonts

which will install all the Indian language fonts on your machine. And once they are installed, it will be possible to view and read the Yahoo India websites in your regional language.

Fig: Yahoo webpage rendered in Malayalam

Fig: The same web page rendered in Hindi

You can even copy and paste pieces of text from the website to a text editor provided the text editor has been compiled with Unicode support.