[OS X Emacs] Rendering Devanagari (Unicode) correctly?

[Richard Cobbe]

This is something that's been bugging me for a while:

What do I need to do in order to render Devanagari text correctly in Emacs
on OS X?

I'm running Emacs as installed from http://emacsformacosx.com/, latest
version (emacs-version says 23.3.1).  Unfortunately, it does a lousy job of
rendering Unicode text that uses Devanagari characters (primarily Unicode
range 0900-097f).  I have the right fonts installed, so the letter forms
show up, but the (admittedly rather complex) rules for rendering text using
these characters aren't followed, so the result isn't particularly useful.

I've attached four small files to show what I mean:

  - devanagari-utf8.txt: a very short text in the Devanagari script

  - devanagari-textedit.png: a screen shot of how this file appears when I
    open it in Apple's TextEdit.app (OS X 10.6.8, all updates applied).
    This the correct rendering.

  - devanagari-osx.png: a screen shot of how the file appears when I open
    it in Emacs for OS X (started with the -q switch, so no configuration
    files, although I get the same results with my normal .emacs file).
    The details of the differences are not likely to be meaningful to
    anyone not familiar with the script, so I won't bore you with details
    -- but notice in particular that this screen shot has downward slashes
    under a couple of the letters, whereas the other screenshots turn the
    neighboring glyphs into ligatures, and Emacs also gets the order of the
    last two glyphs backwards.

  - And, for your interest, devanagari-ubuntu.png, a screen shot of the
    same file opened in gnu emacs 23.2.1 on a Parallels VM running Ubuntu
    11.04 (again started with the -q switch).

So MacOS knows how to render the string, and at least some versions of
Emacs know how to do it.  Is it possible to get Emacs on MacOS to render
this string correctly?

Thanks,

Richard
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