On Tuesday 01 April 2003 08:02 am, Edward H Trager wrote:
Can Jungshik or someone else please clarify for me what
Mozilla 1.3 currently uses for complex script rendering? I'm
seeing differences in rendering of Thai on Linux (horrible)
vs. in Windows (OK) in Mozilla 1.3.
Uniscribe on Windows. It supports Thai.
Well, I guess even on Windows, Mozilla does not make use of Uniscribe
(at least it doesn't explicitly as far as I know) and intelligent
fonts with opentype layout tables. Actually, I'm not sure. I asked about this a
couple of times, but got no answer.
I don't know what it uses on Linux, but it uses something that doesn't support Thai properly,It sorta does if you compile it with CTL(complex text language) feature turned on.
Mozilla source code includes a 'miniature version' of Pango for rendering
a couple of Indic scripts and Thai(contributed by Sun). However, that's only for 'plain gtk'
build of Mozilla (not using Xft but old X11 core fonts). A similar 'hack'
(but not depending on Pango) should be possible for Xft-build of Mozilla when bug
176290 is resolved (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176290)
This is the point about building text rendering into the system. Applications cannot have their own rendering engines in general. So whatever the system renderer supports is the best you can expect in most software (if that).I fully agree with you. The problem with the current Mozilla is that it seems rather
hard to write a bridge to Pango (although I have a couple of 'vague' ideas as to how
to do it and I'm sure genuine gurus of Mozilla have their own better ideas as well.)
Besides, I believe Mozilla-Graphite 'marriage' should serve as a good model
for Mozilla-Pango couple.
Jungshik
P.S. BTW, Thai can get rendered 'automagically' (well, not so great as expected
by Thai people) if you have fonts for simple overstriking with zero/negative
advance for combining characters.
-- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
