[MetaMutator]

Originally Posted by readingglasses

I wonder though, if this isn't also an issue with what fonts are loaded on the kobo? Maybe if one added fonts that were meant for any of these languages to the fonts folder, would it help?

Metamutator, might I ask, did you add any special font in order to see telugu in its basic form,even without the compound letters displaying properly?

Yes, I had to add a Telugu font to get the letters displayed. Without that, you only see boxes.

Originally Posted by readingglasses

This issue of compound characters is a bit confusing. whether telugu compound digraphs or classical greek normal letters compounded with accents, these are all just glyphs that must be included in a font to display. [...] perhaps there is a very involved mechanism for displaying compound characters in telugu, or another similar type of compound alphabet, korean hangul. but it stretches credulity, that so much artificial intelligence would be used when referencing glyphs is the obvious choice

Actually, Unicode only displays characters, not glyphs. As I said, Indic scripts have conjunct vowels and conjunct consonants; to type "india" in Telugu, for instance, you have to type the letters "i" (I'm transliterating here; the actual character is ఇ) + the vowel "am" ("ం") + 'Da' ("డ") + "i" (" ి") + "ya" ("య") + "aa" (" ా") to form ఇండియా.

That is,
ఇండియా (iMDiyaa) = i ("ఇ") + 'am' ("ం") + 'Da' ("డ") + "i" (" ి") + "ya" ("య") + "aa" (" ా")

Note that the first and the third keys I typed are for the same _letter_, ఇ. As far as the character-set is concerned, it's exactly the same character. As far as rendering goes though, they need to be treated differently, as the vowel ఇ and as the _conjunct_ vowel ి. When you "mix" the consonant డ (pronounced 'Da') with the conjunct vowel ి, you get the _letter_ డి, which is pronounced as 'Di'.

This isn't AI at all; this is how the scripts work. Here's a quick primer on rendering scripts in Wikipedia. Here's a bit more on how Windows does it.

Might stretch your credulity in believing that how you order characters matter in many of the world's scripts, but with all due respects, that's more of a comment about your cultural awareness than technical and cultural realities. Trust me when I say that you need a rendering engine in addition to a font. I've been doing this (this being linguistic computing) since 1998.

and it really is just the cutest little device. that e-paper is absolutely like reading a printed page, so easy on the eyes. and it has a very solid yet unassumingly cheap material feel and relaxed yet business like square shape. light as a feather. a real shame if it there's no way to make foreign writing systems work on reflowable formats (epub, txt, html).

Can't deny this.