Why the font you pick will not change your Hindi or Tamil captions
You choose a font, the English words change, the Tamil words stay exactly as they were. Nothing is broken: most fonts simply have no Tamil letters.
This one reaches us as a bug report a lot: “I picked a font and nothing happened.” The person is usually captioning in an Indian language, and the font they picked is a popular display face from a font list.
What is happening
A font file only contains the letters its designer drew. Most display fonts stop at Latin. When a browser, or a renderer, meets a letter the font does not have, it quietly draws that letter from a fallback font instead. So your English words change to the new font and your Tamil words stay in the fallback, which looks exactly like a broken picker.
It can also be the download
Even a font that does cover your script can arrive without it. Google’s older font address returns a Latin only file unless you ask for the other letter sets by name. We found this in our own font loading: Kalam and Teko draw Devanagari, and for a time we were still drawing Hindi in Noto because the file we fetched had no Hindi in it. If you are building something like this, ask for every subset you need and read the file’s character map to check.
Fonts that really draw each script
These are the Google fonts in Captik’s Text tab that really contain each script, counted from the list the editor uses. Each download was checked against the font’s character map.
| Hindi and Marathi (Devanagari) | 21 |
| Tamil | 14 |
| Telugu | 13 |
| Gujarati | 11 |
| Bengali | 10 |
| Kannada | 10 |
| Punjabi (Gurmukhi) | 9 |
| Malayalam | 8 |
| Odia | 5 |
How to get the look you want
- Open the Text tab and tap the chip for your script, so you only see fonts that can draw it
- If you have your own font file with your script in it, upload it (.ttf, .otf, .woff or .woff2) and it works on any caption
- If you want a Latin display font for English words and a script font for the rest, that is what happens by default: each word draws from the font that has its letters
Some faces draw a letter in a traditional or decorative form on purpose. If a letter looks unfamiliar, compare it with Noto before you assume it is wrong, and pick another face if your viewers will trip on it.
Each language page lists its fonts by name. See Tamil, Hindi and the full list of languages.
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