Bugzilla – Bug 104031
Pango enabled applications...
Last modified: 2008-06-25 09:52:16 UTC
As SUSE is getting popularity in all over the world. I'd like to suggest SUSE team to make all applications Pango enable. I used Suse 9.3 with Gnome and found Mozilla/Firefox are not Pango enabled. So no Indic language ware working in them.
SUSE 10.0 should get on par with Mozilla Firefox as used in Fedora Core 3 (and 4). See: http://telugu.sarovar.org/wiki/index.php/IndicFirefox That is, Mozilla Firefox is compiled with Pango+Freetype and it is enabled through a environment variable, if needed. I am not sure why MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO is set by default; for example, there might be some minor performance issues. It's good, for now, to give this easy option to the end-users to view Indic text. There are some still unresolved bugs in Mozilla Firefox (for example: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=240914), which are to be fixed upstream (in Mozilla Firefox).
How you can say that SUSE's next release will come with Pango enabled FireFox? I know about the link you provided. But does SUSE said something like that somewhere in their web site? Red Hat said that all the applications will come Pango enabled from FC4 and Ubuntu is doing that too. QT applications has support for Indic language (without a few little problem). Well, I didn't start this thread for FireFox only. I like all Mozilla products (and I'm involve with Mozilla for Mozilla Bengali l10n project) and unlike me, many users out there doesn't like to use other products for Internet. Someone changed this Bug's component to FireFox, may I ask you why? Don't you want SUSE user's to use Thunderbird or Mozilla Compose? $ MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO=1 firefox This switch is useful only when you are compiling Mozilla product's source. Can anyone tell me how many end user out there know how to compile an application and use it? My self I know that. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=240914 This is not a Linux related thread and please visit again and read my comments. Reporter of that bug wrote that without knowing anything about Unicode. ALL SUSE APPLICATIONS SHOULD COME WITH PANGO OR INDIC LANGUAGE SUPPORT because SUSE says: SUSE is world's most usable Linux. How come it become usable, when it doesn't support my language!!!
Firefox 1.0.x would need much patching to support pango in a bugfree way (IMHO). We most probably are not going to change this in beta phase. Firefox 1.5(pre) and similar carry all these fixes already but are not released yet. Roc?
- I am not sure why MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO is set by default; for example, there might be some minor performance issues. + I am not sure why MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO is not set by default; for example, there might be some minor performance issues. Sorry for the typo. The way that Fedora offers Firefox (and Thunderbird) is that it the default binaries are pango-enabled through the variable $MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO. You do not need to recompile the binary to get the pango functionality; You simply need to set the environment variable above and run again the program. I mentioned bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=240914 as an example of an issue to be fixed to get the pango build of Firefox/Thunderbird working flawlessly for Indic languages. I hope the Mozilla developers are kind enough to sort this out soon. If there is any constructive help to give them, I am more than happy to do so (though I don't speak any Indic language). Actually, the Mozilla bug I mentioned is about the pango-enabled Mozilla which normally shows Indic flawlessly. However, if a website uses specific stylesheets, it has the effect of disabling the pango functionality (for the specific text fragment). Wolfgang, to provide a Pango-enabled (but through an environment variable) Mozilla product, you need to setup some parameters during compilation, and then it's up to the end-user to fiddle with the options and get it working. You may have a look at how Fedora does it: http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/4/SRPMS/firefox-1.0.4-4.src.rpm or get someone who is well-versed in Indic support to help out.
I will have a look if we can enable pango without risk and as option. (I know that the Fedora package has plenty of patches for Pango stuff)
*** Bug 105698 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Two comments: (1) IMHO It would be much better to provide Firefox with Indic support right-out-of-the-box. There should be no requirement for the user to have to fiddle with options and environment variables. That's ridiculous. KDE 3.4.2 and Konqueror, Gnome and Open Office, and even IE running under Wine all have Indic support right-out-of-the-box with no need to fiddle with options or environment variables. As Pango is already a fairly mature library, it seems absurd to me that Firefox does not default to using Pango instead of "pango lite" or whatever is actually in the source tree. I guess we should all encourage the Mozilla/Firefox developers to make resolving this issue a top priority. (2) I would like to reproduce here some relevant commentary I received from Jungshik Shin in a separate email: "Mozilla.org's default build (xft+gtk2 but without pango) doesn't do it (i.e. Indic rendering) well because my patch for bug 215219 is not checked in. However, blizzard fixed bug 214719 and RedHat's (and Fedora Core) builds (xft+gtk2+ pango) of Firefox support complex scripts (almost) as well as Pango support them. (the downside of his approach is that MathML is not supported so well as in the default mozilla.org build) See http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.7.11/known-issues-int.html for more details (it's not up to date, though)." It would be worth finding out from Jungshik if his patch for bug 215219 does not result in deterioration of MathML support, and the details of what other differences there are between his solution and Blizzard's / Redhat Fedora's solution. -- Ed Trager Bioinformatics Kellogg Eye Center University of Michigan
For all the details, here's the complete URL for Mozilla bug 215219: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=__open__&id=215219
With my patch, MathML just works as well as without it. However, it needs more testing (and probably updating to the ccurrent trunk) As far as complex script support is concerned, mozilla products built with '--enable-pango' works better than with my patch because it supports BiDI natively (for RTL scripts) and it also supports cursor movement and selection with 'grapheme boundaries' respected. blizzard did some work on Pango to support MathML with Gecko products built with 'enable-pango'. I'm not sure how good it is. There have been some reports of MathML problems on FC3's firefox, but I haven't had time to take a detailed look at them. Another downside is nsFontMetricsPango (that is compiled in when 'enabled-pango' is turned on) lags behind nsFontMetricsXft (for gtk2+ xft). For instance, it doesn't support multiple fonts for a language/CSS style combination and non-ASCII Xft font names (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=288634)
over the weekend I had a look at the pango stuff. 1. Firefox 1.0.x doesn't have any native complete pango support 2. merging all the pango stuff is not possible in 10.0 timeframe anymore This has to be later.
There are Thousands of bug in Mozilla product. Can anyone tell me which software doesn't come with any bug. Even Suse has some other bugs I've found. That doesn't mean I should leave Mozilla/Suse, does it? So why to waste our time finding problems of other vendors we cannot control! May be it's late to add a Pango Enable Mozilla Suite in Suse 10.0, but it's not late for 10.1 or the upcoming versions. People really need this and we have to understand. One of you has located http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.7.11/known-issues-int.html but have you ever visited the download page of Mozilla? They have some old release with Pango. -- Omi Azad Contributor Bangla Computing and Localization Projects: Ankur: http://www.ankurbangla.org Ekushey: http://www.ekushey.org
Did someone mention that we won't work on this? This is Resolved-Later so it doesn't screw up the 10.0 buglists. But Pango support is definitely on our TODO list for 10.1
mass reopening all SuSE Linux bugs that are set to REMIND+LATER to change the resolution to WONTFIX (adapting to new policy)
Closing old LATER+REMIND bugs as WONTFIX - if you still plan to work on it, feel free to reopen and set to ASSIGNED. In case the report saw repeated reopen comments, it's due to bugzilla timing out on the huge request ;(