Mozilla Firefox - Kannada myth

Out-of-box flawless rendering of Kannada on Firefox is still a myth for normal Kannada user on Linux.

The Silly variable

The variable
MOZ_PANGO_ENABLE
does not affect the pango rendering on Firefox anymore... or so it seems. While doing a fresh installation from [:http://www.ubuntu.com/download|Ubuntu Dapper Live CD], I observed that the /usr/bin/firefox now comes with this little piece of code:


if [ "x${MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO}" = x ]; then
if egrep '^(bn|gu|hi|kn|ml|mr|ne|pa|ta|te)_' \
/var/lib/locales/supported.d/*[^~] >/dev/null 2>&1; then
MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=0
else
MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1
fi
export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO
fi


which means someone has eased your part of job. Yay.

But not-so-geeky Kannada users who have En-US locale set as default might still be caught wondering "what the heck has happened to Firefox, Kannada is appearing garbled" during the first time installation.

Someone even mailed me the other week saying:

Is there *any* way I can get firefox showing kannada properly.
I've tried the MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO with every single version of ubuntu so far, but to no avail. *sigh*

;)

The little secret there is evident from the above little piece of code:

1) Switch to an Indic locale.

OR

2) Just remove the above mentioned part from the shell script (correct me if I'm wrong).

[edit]
Note: Remember to remove Mallige set of fonts from:
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-kannada-fonts/.

Do a $fc-cache once that is done.

[/edit]

To think that we had been doing builds of Pango-enabled Firefox just couple of months back :P
Or even worse - remember that "Taming the Dragon" page we had on Indlinux wiki and all those tough days to get Indic rendered properly on Mozilla! We surely are heading towards good days there. ;)

Untamed bug

Although Mozilla is very much tamed for [w:Indic|Indic] now (apart from one or two little modifications needed like the above - that still counts as a barrier for newbies; and something which the geeky crowd would hardly mind), we have some of the not-so-serious but irritating bugs like [:https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=240914|this one]. Its a pity that they have been marked for 3.0 release - which could be *years* from now.

The solution, it seems, is in using the Uniscribe APIs and doing a complete rewrite as [:https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=240914#c1|Jungshik Shin points out]. The bug regarding that has been there for a [:https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=218887|significant amount of time now].

Some of these days, I hope to get a team of enthusiasts working on this re-write (maybe through [:http://sampada.net|Sampada]?).