Why Do Hindi and Tamil Characters Break Even When the Page Uses UTF-8?

JavaScript
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1

I’m working with multilingual web content and I’m curious about an issue that seems different from a normal UTF-8 problem.

A page can be correctly configured for UTF-8, but Hindi or Tamil text can still appear incorrectly when the source content originally comes from an older legacy font system. In those cases, changing the CSS font doesn’t actually convert the text because the underlying character mapping is different.

How would you approach this in a web application — convert the legacy text to Unicode first, or try to handle the legacy font at the rendering layer?

3

If the page has been coded in an incorrect mapping, the correct answer for me would be to recode it correctly to the Unicode form and override to a Unicode font; time is not moving backwards, and legacy fonts will eventually phase out in favor of the Standard.

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