The Gautami and Vani (telugu) fonts, are missing ర sound that goes with the consonants

It’s great that Libre has two options for Telugu users!

Perhaps it’s a bug or I’m not able to see it, but I’m unable to figure out how to get the ర sounding character to accompany the consonants. This is an important symbol needed in Telugu and currently త్ర శ్ర are the only ones that have the crescent below the consonants added. That crescent symbol below needs to accompany each consonant to produce the (rah) ర sound.

If a combination of keys accomplishes this, please advise. Currently, I’ve attempted different things, but am unable to figure it out.

Thanks,
libreuser10

I know nothing about Telugu, but I wonder if the site below might help.
Good luck!

https://keyman.com/keyboards?q=Telugu&x=0&y=0

I have no practical knowledge of Telugu but I had a look at the related Unicode section, both on my computer and on the site.

From what I understand from the writing system, consonants are primary units and vowels modify the shape of consonants as “diacritics”. In the chart (U+0C00 to U+0C7F), vowels have names like TELEGU VOWEL SIGN xx and the code points have property “combining character”.

The character you reference in your question, U+0C30 TELEGU LETTER RA, is a consonant and, ipso facto, has no combining property. The examples shown look like U+0C24 TELEGU LETTER TA and U+0C36 TELEGU LETTER SHA both with subscripted crescent. The form taken by the combination seems to be qualified as a “conjunct”. In other scripts, this would be named a ligature.

Ligatures are not handled manually by the author but automatically substituted when met. Ligatures are advertised through a table in the font file. The document processor uses the table to detect the combinations and access the composite character.

If this does not work for conjuncts other than SHA/TA + RA, this means the ligature has not been included in the font. As there is no combining character shaped as a subjoined crescent, you have no manual workaround.

Your only solution is to look for a font shipping with an extensive set of ligatures.

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