Re: Translations, GNOME and KDE

[Danilo Segan <danilo gnome org>]

Ramanan Selvaratnam <rama@uklinux.net> writes:
>
> But you missed something that is much more important web browser
> support.
> We all know apart from speed Konqueror using Qt brings uniformity.
> What do we have for probably the biggest use of software on PCs
> nowadays... the Gecko engine which does not use system's layout
> capabilities. Gecko support for Indic complex text layout sucks.
> So Epiphany for Tamil sucks.
> Here lies the biggest defining difference for me between KDE and Qt.

These days, there's a discussion on linux-utf8@nl.linux.org that
revolves around Mozilla and support for Indic scripts.

This is what Jungshik Shin <jshin at mailaps org> had to say in one
of the latest e-mails:

>  There's yet another method that just became the best of three although
> it's just a _priliminary_ patch. I revised my patch for mozilla bug 215219
> (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215219).  With the patch,
> Mozilla (--enable-xft, --enable-default-toolkit=gtk2, 'enable-ctl' is
> NOT necessary [1]) takes advantage of Pango's complex script rendering
> ability (http://www.pango.org) so that Mozilla's rendering capability
> is only limited by Pango (in a sense). Devanagari, Malaylalam, Tamil,
> Thai, Bengali, and more are supported with _standard_ opentype fonts
> (as opposed to custom-encoded fonts). However, I have  more work to do
> to support the cursor movement/selection at the  grapheme level. [2].
> There are also issues with the code organization (some tasks done by
> my patch had better be done in a different part of Mozilla). Besides,
> I've been experiencing a mysterious crash at one particular URL (that
> doesn't have anything but US-ASCII) with this patch.  Anyway, with my
> latest patch to the bug, Mozilla-Xft (gtk2 + xft) is about on par with
> Mozilla-Win on Windows __2k/XP__ in terms of complex script handling.
> 
>  With the patch,  you should list opentype Devanagari fonts such as
> Raghindi at the beginning instead of SunIndic fonts.

Previous discussion revolves around making Devanagari work with
--enable-ctl, but I don't know if that's relevant to your problem.

This confirms your point below:
>
> I thought this will be the biggest winner eventually when Pango will be
> used to shape complex text for Gecko but worryingly I learnt that this
> is not for sure...
>

So, Pango seems to be what Jungshik prefers too, and my guess is this
will be integrated into next Mozilla release. But I urge you to test
it and harrass them (Mozilla developers) to include it as soon as
they can if it works fine.


HTH for this particular issue

Cheers,
Danilo

PS. Sorry for not reading other e-mails in the thread first, someone
may have already given a proper answer.