Tamil in Leopard

Perhaps more importantly, if A variety of tamil fonts besides InaiMathi were available for the Muracu Anjal layout+driver, it would be greatly greatly appreciated.

It doesn't depend on the layout. Currently OS X does not support OpenType fonts for such scripts and requires Apple's own technology, AAT. Only one AAT font is available, except perhaps if you want to get the kit from Xenotypetech:

http://www.xenotypetech.com/osxTamil.html

I doubt Apple will produce more such fonts for Tamil, since quite a few languages still have none at all. It would be useful, however, to ask Apple to add OpenType support for this script to OS X, so Windows fonts could be used. This was done in Leopard finally for Arabic.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

You may be able to use Windows Tamil Unicode fonts in the app OpenOffice for X11, which would give you more variety. This works for Hindi but I have not yet tried it for Tamil.

I'll check your points about input and post on that later.

Using the Tamil font Inaimathi (for Muracu Anjal), the keystroke for "ற்ற்" should be—and has been in all previous incarnations of OSX—"tr". This no longer functions correctly in Leopard. Similarly, the em-dash is no longer available when typing in Tamil, as it used to be in Tiger.

Definitely new bugs, should be reported via the feedback channel.

It might be worth trying to fix this by going into the Tamil IM (System/Library/Input Methods/TamilIM/Contents/Resources) where there are Anjal.keylayout and AnjalTransliterator.txt files one can play with.

PS My idea worked. By modifying the two files I was able to get tr and the em-dash back, though the tr result is missing one dot, so it needs more work.

I am unable to get the tamil font. Can u advice me where to download this please . Tried few sites but no luck so far.