May 21, 2008

Indic font support in Firefox 2.0 on Linux

This is bad news. I just found out that even though my FC6 distro supports Telugu (and other Indian) language pack(s), the Firefox 2.0 browser's giving some problems. Apparently for correct rendering of Indic fonts, Firefox should be precompiled with pango enabled (the --enable-pango flag should be set during compilation of the source). But mozilla doesn't prefer enabling it in its builds, which is fine, as long as it provides regular src rpms. But finding src rpms for Ff 2.0 isn't easy (finding regular rpms itself is difficult, I don't understand why mozilla doesn't provide rpms for Ff 2.0), and even though I did (35.8 MB at 20 kBps), apparently there are other prerequisites which i'll have to hunt down using apt-get or yum. And then there are other issues i might have to take care of too, which i don't understand for the worth of me.

Bottom line: I thought of writing a telugu post, but can't right now. :(

Edit: I'm back to using Ff 1.5 (had to format the prev. installation :-/ ) build which comes with the distro itself, which does support pango. And since Ff 3.0 is gonna be out tomorrow, I needn't bother upgrading to 2.0! yay!!

1 comment:

bd said...

Don't worry my friend. Firefox 3 is very good with indic scripts. Pango is now, by default, enabled.
www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord