Image Magick - complex character in Kannada (indic language) not being rendered properly

Question

I'm trying to use imagemagick to generate some images of Kannada text. The problem is that complex characters are being rendered separately (not together as they should be... imagine that "ku" should be one character, but it is rendered first as "k-" and then as "-u")

Concretely, ಗ್ರಾಮ ಕೋಡ್ gets rendered as this:

The command I am using is:

convert -background lightblue -fill blue -pointsize 48 -font '/Library/Fonts/Kannada Sangam MN.ttf' label:@Kannada_test.txt label_utf8.gif

On another program, TextEdit, the same font renders the text fine:

Any hints as to how I can get imagemagick to display these complex characters properly?

Answer 1

I’m afraid you can’t, because ImageMagick seems to be incapable of handling combining marks. That is, it cannot combine them with preceding characters to produce proper graphic presentation but render a spacing glyph for the mark.