85204 - Require Devanagari script support for Indian languagues

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Internationalization, enhancement)

Description

[Neeraj Desai]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; HP-UX B.10.20 9000/785; en-US; rv:0.9)
Gecko/20010508
BuildID:    2001050908

I would like to request for Mozilla.org to include the support for the
'devanagari' script used by over a billion people for reading and writing in
Indian languages like Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati etc..... It was
suprising that while Mozilla has support for the script from all the regions of
the world except the support for devanagari script that is used daily by over a
billion people! I find it hard to understand that while the 'devanagari' script
is so scientific in its represntation it has been left out by Mozilla. I am not
surprised about the biggest detterant for Mozilla being accepted in India which
is due to lack of support for the 'devanagari' script that is being used by so
many Indian languages.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.NO support for the devanagari script used by over a billion people of India
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Frank Tang]

HP bug, reassign to shanjian. 
mark it as future. 

                                                                                 
[e-mail]: 
1. as I understand Gujarati use different scripts than devanagari, right?
2. Does HP support these scripts ? It will be nice if you can give us more 
details about those supports. 
3. [e-mail] (Prabhat Hegde) is leading the efforts to put complex 
language into mozilla's linux support. His first pilot project will be enable 
Thai. And he will bring more Indian scripts into mozilla by follow the Thai work. 
Please work with [e-mail] . 
4. One of the problem of enable Indian script is lack of information. The only 
information we have is 
1) Unicode 3.0 standard, which include information about devanagari,etc, but lack 
of information about glyph and fonts.
2) ISCII standard- same as above. 

It will be nice if you can provide more technical details. See how the bidi folks 
did in http://www.langbox.com/AraMosaic/mozilla/
And also the information I collected about Thai under - http://
people.netscape.com/ftang/i18n.html#goodthaisites

Comment 2

[Frank Tang]

reassign to [e-mail]

Comment 3

[Prabhat Hegde]

folks,

OK. Will spend some time on this during the next month or so. As frank
mentioned, major problem with indic script is standardization and lack
of information.

For a start, i could add support for all 'Shape Charsets'/Font Encodings
supported for indic scripts in pango and also 'sun.unicode.india-0' SUN's
unicode-encoded indian language font encoding. I don't know of MSFT having
CPIDs for indic scripts, if so, pl let me know.

Will also add iscii<->unicode encoders.

Pl let me know if anyone else is interested in helping me out.

prabhat.

Comment 4

[Prabhat Hegde]

Attachment: A patch to create a hindi shaper for *nix

The following new files are needed which will appear in the subsequent
attachment

Comment 5

[Prabhat Hegde]

Attachment: Devanagari Shaper

As most people who will read this bug description will know, Indian Languaged
do not follow standard font encodings. Due to this and also due to the
proliferation of non-standard content (illegal usage of x-user-defined)
providing a clean indian language support for non-intelligent font is
difficult. However, OT fonts are not expected to be popular soon, nor are they
expected to be available for all indian languages soon. Currently only
Microsoft platform has OT fonts for Indian Languages.

For this reason i propose to provide support for 1 truetype font encoding per 
indian language which can be used for platforms that do not provide OT support.

Work on supporting Indic OT fonts will proceed in parallel with this, Please
contact ([e-mail] or [e-mail]) if you're interested in
helping with Indic language support.

This shaper will shape Devanagari rendered using sun.unicode.india-0 font
encoding. Sun intends to make this indian language font (which will cover 8 
indian languages) availabe for free downloads.

If anyone has any comments, pl let me know,

thanks,
prabhat

Comment 6

[Prabhat Hegde]

Attachment: new files for hindiShaper w.r.t trunk in zip form

Comment 7

[Prabhat Hegde]

Attachment: Replace nsCtlLEModule in trunk with one in this zip attachment for NETSCAPE_7_0_OEM_BRANCH

Comment 8

[Prabhat Hegde]

Attachment: extensions/ctl/public/nsCtlCIID.h

Files in text form

Comment 9

[Prabhat Hegde]

Attachment: extensions/ctl/public/nsILE.h

Comment 10

[Prabhat Hegde]

Attachment: extensions/ctl/src/nsCtlLEModule.cpp

Comment 11

[Prabhat Hegde]

Attachment: Files in Text form - ignore #96249, #96251

Comment 12

[Prabhat Hegde]

hindi non-intelligent font support for *nix cheched into trunk via tracker bug
#163962.

Next would be working on OT support. Will open other bugs for this.

Comment 13

[Andreas Becker]

Changing QA contact to bobj for now. Bob, please re-assign further as you see is
appropriate.