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Joomla! Template – Tamil Font problem

In my voluntary role as Vice-Chairman in INFITT I am currently helping in maintaining the website of INFITT.ORG. One of the things is to get myself familiar with a Web CMS called Joomla! – which is a LAMP based Free Open Source CMS that is targeted for small community websites.

This post is about problems we faced in Joomla! for Tamil Texts and two quick fixes that solved it for us.

1) The CSS Problem in the Top Navigation Menu. The menu in IE 6.0/7.0 will have the text appearing below the menu – invisible to naked eye. It turned out to be the CSS had issues, which we fixed and republished in our implementation. If you face the same issue, please download the fixed template_css.css from here or view it here. Menu with Tamil Text in Joomla! 

2) Pages had problems displaying Tamil in IE 7/Vista. Tamil text were displayed but as jumbled non readable characters. It turns out to be that charset is not set to UTF-8. I changed the flag to set it to UTF-8 in the file /www/templates/js_education/js_template_config.php in the Joomla! instance we had.

July 19th, 2007 | Category: localization, Open Source | 2 comments

IFilter – Desktop Search PDF files

If you are using any of the Microsoft Search tools like MOSS 2007, Desktop Search, Vista Search, SQL Server FreeText Search or Indexing Server you will need a piece of software called IFilter. IFilter is a set of DLLs designed for each file format that you want to be indexed and searched.

Microsoft ships for their file formats in Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) when you install the Office Suite in the machine. Out of box, the search tools include for IFilters for Text, HTMLs, etc. But if you need to index additional file formats most commonly for PDF (Adobe  Acrobat) you will need to download IFilters for them and install. The installation will not give you any User-Interface Application or will you need to configure anything. Just install the IFilter package and reboot your machine or indexing service. That’s it.

The sources for getting IFilters are many, I have listed few of them below:

  • FoxIt Software IFilter – Download here (32 and 64bit). This supports 64bit of Vista and Windows XP, many of the other IFilters don’t
  • Adobe’s own IFilter for PDF files – Download here. If you have the Free Acrobat Reader 8.0 or so you will get the IFilter also pre installed along with it  
  • Search Windows Live Gallery for more IFilters here. Here you will find for PDF and several other file formats
July 19th, 2007 | Category: Tools | 2 comments