Sinhala on OS X Leopard – Still out of luck

Cerno’s post encouraged me to go back to what I had written mid-last year on the lack of Sinhala language UNICODE support on Macs. At the time I was on Tiger, Safari 2 and Firefox 2. Here’s the same page as before on the new browsers:

Click for larger image – Safari 3 on left, FF 3 Beta 5 on right

Clearly, things haven’t improved with Safari 3, Firefox 3 Beta 5 and Leopard.

I’ve download several UNICODE Sinhala font files, including Sarasavi from the University of Colombo Language Technology Research Laboratory. I’ve used their online font conversion.

Yet nothing gets the rendering quite right on Leopard, though what I see is strangely much better than what’s rendered on Cerno’s Mac.

Anyway, I still have to Bootcamp it into Vista whenever I have to do any serious work with Sinhala.

Here’s a tip for Windows users – the rather unimaginatively EnSiTip English Sinhala popup dictionary extension for Firefox, which under Windows is really quite brilliant and I found on the LTRL blog.

WARNING: For folks who are so advanced with technology, I would have imagined that LTRL would have had the good sense to optimise images for the web. But no. The LTRL blog has gems like 2Mb+ JPG images which make the page a nightmare to load. Just don’t try it over SLT ADSL on a bad day…

In short, us Mac users are still out of luck. Which is such a pity, since in every other respect, Macs trump Windows hands down (my two year old Dual Core Macbook Pro gave a Windows Vista Experience rating higher than a Core2Duo Sony Vaio bought earlier this year).

Are ICTA / LTRL listening?