In last week’s
post, I talked about the first tweaks I did to Ubuntu after upgrading
the system to Bionic Beaver. This week, I’ve got a few more tweaks
that I found useful. Just adding this here in the hopes that someone
will find it useful (or I’ll forget how I did it – so it’s good
to keep a how-to lying around).
6. Change Default
Sinhala Font on Firefox
Ubuntu has supported
sinhala fonts for a few years now. Gone are the days of patched up
font glyphs – we now have true sinhala unicode! During
installation, Ubuntu will ask you for your location and install
native languages accordingly (if you didn’t, you can always install
your language of choice via Language Support in Settings).
I didn’t change
the System settings since I don’t really need sinhala on the GUI
but noticed that sinhala rendering on Firefox seemed horrible. The
letters were too thin and difficult on the eyes.
The browser was
displaying the unicode content alright but the font wasn’t the best
out there.
 |
| https://si.wikipedia.org/ as seen on Firefox with DejaVu typeface |
Compare the above
picture with the one below. It is a screen grab of the same content
when viewed on Firefox in Windows 10.
 |
| Windows 10 uses Nirmala UI to render Sinhala on the web |
Notice how Windows
rendering is much better and has constant thickness on letters
(sans-serif!), this is because it uses a font called Nirmala UI.
Nirmala UI is an
Indic scripts typeface. Inidic scripts are writing systems derived
from Brahmic scripts and are the basis for almost all writing systems
native to South Asia. Nirmala was first released for Windows in 2012
and is based on Segoe UI, which is now the default font for
Microsoft.
You can download
Nirmala UI here: https://www.wfonts.com/font/nirmala-ui.
Extract it and click install (top right corner) as shown below,
Ubuntu will take care of the rest.
Then, on Firefox, go
to preferences and under Language and Appearance click on Advanced.
A new dialog box
opens – similar to the one shown below. In the fonts for section,
there is a list of supported fonts, choose Sinhala, select Nirmala
and click OK.
There we have it.
You can read sinhala web pages without going nuts over fonts. One
more thing, this changes the font on web browser only – to apply it
system wide, you can install GNOME Tweaks; it allows you to change
system with just a few clicks.
7. Increase scroll
speed on Firefox
While browsing,
noticed that scroll speed on the mouse was too slow. Luckily, Firefox
takes pride in the level of customizability it offers to its users.
In a new tab, type about:config in the address
bar and press Enter.
In the search box above the list, type or paste
mousewheel.min_line_scroll_amount and pause while the list is
filtered. You can change the number of lines Firefox scrolls a page,
try changing it from 5 to 30, or whatever suits you.
