gVim seems to have problems displaying text in Tamil (and possibly other Indic languages), even when the font supports it. For eg., here's some text in Emacs and the same text in gVim (both under Windows):
Both use the exact same font here (Dejavu Sans Mono, 13). But within Vim, the characters are all overlapping with each other to the point of unreadability, whereas emacs seems to have no problem displaying it.
To make the problem clear, here's a single word from the text, first in emacs: 
, and then in Vim 
.
I've tried many other Unicode monospace fonts available, and the result is the same: other editors display the Tamil glyphs without an issue, while Vim's are the same overlapping mess every time.
Is this type of rendering problems a known issue, and are there any fixes or workaround available? I'd prefer to continue editing in Vim for Tamil texts too, if it is at all possible.
:verbose set guifontwide?:verbose set guifontset?Also do you recall ever installing fonts for Tamil script on your computer? (I ask because DejaVuSansMono doesn't appear to include any glyphs for Tamil so I'm wondering if gVim is performing font substitution.guifontwideis empty, and I getE519: Option not supported: guifontset?when I try the second command. I have a bunch of fonts for Tamil script installed, for eg. there's the default Latha included with Windows, in addition I have Lohit Tamil and Vijaya, and most recently I installed GNU Unifont which includes glyphs for Tamil (verified these by looking at the Tamil Unicode subrange of these fonts in Windowscharmap). I tried setting these as theguifontwide, but I get 'Invalid wide font' error, and I don't know fonts enough to understand what would be a valid wide font.guifont?E596: Invalid font. There's more evidence for the font substitution theory though: I restarted my computer in the mean time (for the first time after installing Unifont), and the Tamil glyph rendering inside Vim is relatively noticeably better now, even though I haven't changed the actual font Vim is supposed to use. My guess is that the font used for font substitution has automatically changed since a new one became available. Is there any way to find out what the font substitution process is doing, and perhaps customize the font options used for substitution?