1022334 - Enable Hyphenation for Indic languages

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Anivar Aravind]

Attachment: Malayalam website in browser which lacks hyphenation,

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/33.0.1750.152 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Take any website with indic language content in browser(eg: indic wikipedias), or check long texts which spans more than one line in any applications. you can see that hyphenation is not enabled in FFOS. 


Actual results:

The Hyphenation is broken as shown in the attached image.  Huge indic language strings without proper hyphenation will spoil the user experience. 


Expected results:

There should be proper hyphenation algorithms integrated with gaia. 
indic hyphenation algorithms can be found at http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/smc/hyphenation.git/tree/web 

Example: http://mirror.rackdc.com/savannah//smc/hyphenation/web/example.html

Comment 1

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

We're using the hyphen library in gecko, with the TeX-based hyphenation dictioaries.

There are some in http://tug.org/tex-hyphen/#languages for Indic languages, but at least one is LGPL3, which we can't use.

Johnathan seems to be the master of the dicts there, you can see bug 987668 for an example of adding new hyphenation dicts, including all the licensing foobar.

I suggest that you create bugs in Core -- Layout: Text and make them block this bug, to add blocks of new hyphenation dicts.

Comment 2

[Anivar Aravind]

Thanks. What all are compatible licenses ? 
I hope we can re license them. Santhosh who created hyphen rules for indic is from our developer collective. Tug.org points same files.

Comment 3

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

The files need to be MPL2 compatible, http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/license-policy.html#Licenses_Compatible_with_the_MPL

Comment 4

[Santhosh Thottingal]

A generic bug to have more hyphenation patterns including Indic languages were discussed in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=672320

Jonathan Kew indicatd that LGPL may be acceptable as per new policy(https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=672320#c113: The policy now states that "it may be permissible to import Third Party Code under the LGPL (version 2.0 upwards) to be Product Code if it's a clearly-demarcated library and will be dynamically linked into the product", which might be OK for hyphenation resources, but we should verify that with Gerv.)

If somebody can confirm that a license change is really required, I can work on it.

Comment 5

[Anivar Aravind]

Thank you Santhosh. I was searching for this old bug before filing this one . But failed to get it

Comment 6

[Anivar Aravind]

Pike

Comment 7

[Santhosh Thottingal]

Licensing should not be an issue now since I relicensed the packages to permissive license MIT.

Comment 8

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on