Fonts

Tamil, set well.

Tamil is a syllabic script with ligatures and stacked marks, and not every font on a Windows PC handles them the same way. Here is what we recommend, and what Quillar uses itself.

Recommended: Murasu Anjal

Murasu Anjal is the Tamil font and input system most of our readers already know. Its fonts render classical and modern Tamil cleanly across Windows programs, and its keyboard layouts are the ones most Tamil typists learned on. It is a commercial product; we recommend it, we do not bundle it.

Murasu Anjal at anjal.net →

What Quillar uses

Quillar renders its own text with Noto Serif Tamil for headwords and Noto Sans Tamil for definitions — Google's open fonts, shipped inside the app and on this site so every entry looks the same on every machine. You do not need to install anything for Quillar itself.

கடல் — சமுத்திரம், ஒரு பேரெண், சதயநாள், மிகுதி.

If Tamil looks wrong elsewhere

  • Boxes or question marks: the program's font has no Tamil glyphs. Choose a Tamil-capable font in that program (Nirmala UI ships with Windows; Murasu Anjal or Noto Tamil are better).
  • Marks in the wrong place: the program is not doing complex-script shaping. Newer versions of most programs fix this; otherwise paste into one that does.
  • Quillar's glance window always renders correctly, whatever the program you selected the word in.