We have a small web app that we want to convert into something native. Right now, it's got a lot of moving parts (the backend, the browser etc.) and we'd like to convert it into a single tight application. We decided to use PyGame to do this and it's been fine so far except for a font rendering issue.
The string I'd like to render is कोझिकोड. This, correctly rendered looks like 
.
The specific code points are \u0915 \u094b \u091d \u093f \u0915 \u094b and \u0921
Now, this looks fine in my editor and my browser but when I try to render it in PyGame, I get this 
. Basically, the vowel sign (\u093f ि) should have been on the left of the झ but it appears to its right (and to the left of the क) thereby messing it up completely. This doesn't happen in a browser or a text editor (with the same input string) so I'm guessing it a renderer problem in PyGame.
There is one crude fix which works only in this specific case which i s to put the ि (\u093f) before the झ (\u091d). In that case, it renders properly like so 
. This relies on me knowing something about the language and putting that logic into the code. I have to deal with multiple languages here so that's not really feasible.
I don't have much experience with unicode so I don't know how to approach this problem. Is there something I can do to fix this?
In case it matters, I'm using the freesans font which is there on Debian and which has the necessary glyphs to render this.
Update: The code to actually render this is as follows
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import time
import pygame
# Pygame setup and create root window
pygame.font.init()
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((320, 200))
empty = pygame.Surface((320, 200))
font_file = pygame.font.match_font("freesans") # Select and
font = pygame.font.Font(font_file, 30) # open the font
writing = font.render(u"कोिझकोड कोझिकोड", True, (0, 0, 0)) # Render text on a surface
screen.fill((255, 255, 255)) # Clear the background
screen.blit(writing, (10, 10)) # Blit the text surface on the background
pygame.display.flip() # Refresh the display
input() # Wait for input before quitting
This is what it looks like 
The first word is rendered correctly but we've done it by inverting the vowel and the letter positions as I mentioned in the crude fix. The second is written properly but not rendered correctly.
Update 2: In the absence of anything else, I've decided to try to render the string into an image using an external program and then blit this image onto the PyGame Surface. I tried imagemagick but it messes us in the same way as this. Gimp works fine and so I'm planning to use the batch mode to get my work done.
