[Indic-computing-devel] Indic Support on Mozilla

[Prabhat H. <sam...@ya...>]

replies inline.
--- आलोक Alok <al...@ya...> wrote:
> Hi List,
> > > available to help. Currently, i am looking at
> Indic OT
> > > support in Mozilla.
> > 
> > Works fine on my Windows XP box (except for
> keyboard input). I think
> > our energies are better spent in making X support
> OT fonts. XFreeST
> 

X support of Indic OT fonts is no longer a problem
with a combination of FT2 + ICU. This is the approach
we've used for Indic script support in OpenOffice.

> About the mozilla indic display on Windows xp:
> It would work fine only if you have the Indian
> langauge pack installed. Not
> otherwise.
> Currently the only two ways (that I know) to make
> mozilla display indic
> characters properly are:
> 1. on Winxp with the Indian langauge pack installed.
> 2. on linux with Indix installed.
> 

I am not sure how 2 works. But that may be because i
have'nt looked up Indix.

> This was about mozilla. Apart from mozilla, the
> other ways are:
> 1. IE 5 and above - win98 and upwards.
> 
> So, what this means in effect is, that IE5 will
> display indic properly on a non
> xp windows machine, but not mozilla.
> 

I am not sure that Uniscribe is widely supported on
W98. Uniscribe is used to perform drawing and
measurement of text and is needed on Windows to
support Indic languages. It is possible that user
needs to download a later version of IE which in-turn
installs Uniscribe. (roundabout way)

> Mozilla being a crossplatform browser, it would be a
> good thing if it has in
> built indic rendering support - that way we're
> enabling indic support for the
> browsers for win*, *nix and mac in one shot.
> 

Mozilla's rendering support resides in the gfx layer
which uses native toolkits (ie gtk or other, windows,
mac etc). So, I am not sure that having it in the XP
layer is possible or recommended. 

regards,
prabhat

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