206146 - change 'Hindi' with to 'Devanagari'

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Internationalization, defect)

Description

[Jungshik Shin]

Devanagari (and other Indic scripts) are rather like Latin and Cyrillic. They
can be used to write multiple languages. Therefore, both in the UI and in our
internal references, we'd better use 'Devanagari'/x-devanagari (a la 'x-western'
and 'x-cyrillic') instead of 'Hindi / hi-IN'.

I raised this issue in bug 204586 and today found that Aloc Kuma also mentioned
about it Mozilla I18N
newsgroup(news://news.mozilla.org:119/[e-mail])
and my response to him (news://news.mozilla.org:119/ba728l$[e-mail])

> Why would you need fonts for Hindi separately?

  Because Unicode is not just for Devanagari and there's a need to let users
specify fonts for different scripts separately even though all of them are in
Unicode.

> (I guess it's something on the lines of IE's script/font mapping - in
> that case it should be fonts for devanagari rather than fonts for
> hindi)

  I agree with you and that's why I'm filing this bug.

Related to this bug are bug 204586 and bug 206123.

Comment 1

[Jungshik Shin]

Attachment: patch

This is a simple patch (mostly in xul and *properties file). Changes in the
actual code are just changes in labels (in nsFontMetrics(Xlib|GTK). In
nsFontMetricsXft, I added an entry to the mapping table between Mozilla's
langGroup and fontconfig's lang. In that case, I followed what's done for
x-western, x-baltic and x-cyrillic. That is, I just picked one representative
language for the script (Hindi).

Comment 2

[Jungshik Shin]

Xft change will fix the following symptom observed by Aloc Kuma in his posting
(news://news.mozilla.org:119/[e-mail])

> And, there are "no fonts available" for Hindi.

Comment 3

[Jungshik Shin]

Comment on attachment 123628 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

This is just a simple change in labelling (more in line with the expectation of
Devanagari script users and Hindi speakers). Let's fix this quickly.

Comment 4

[Roy Yokoyama]

The patch looks simple enough.
However, I am not sure if it's a good idea to remove 'Hindi'.

simon/prabhat: can one of you comment on it?
jshin: Dont' get me wrong. I really appreciate your contributions.
       However, in this case, I am seeking for an opinion from respective gurus.

Comment 5

[Christopher Blizzard (:blizzard)]

Comment on attachment 123628 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

rs=blizzard

Comment 6

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

I'm certainly not a "guru," but to the best of my knowledge the bottom line is
that since "Devanagari" is the name of the script, and "Hindi" is the name of
only one of several languages that are written in that script, "Devanagari" is
acceptable and meaningful to everybody, including Hindi speakers, but it is less
acceptable, and probably even annoying, for e.g. Marathi speakers to specify
that they want fonts for "Hindi".

Comment 7

[Jungshik Shin]

Thanks blizzard for sr.
Thanks, Simon, for your good explanation. That's exactly what I had in mind. 
BTW, I have an patch (bug 204586 [1])to add _lang_ (not langGroup) 'hi' (along
with some other 'lang's ) to langGroup.properties file.

[1] In the patch uploaded there, 'hi' may not be present because I dropped it
while shuffling a few patches  affecting that file. 

P.S. Roy, I didn't get you wrong by any means :-). Don't worry a bit. 

Comment 8

[Alok Kumar]

Simon has elaborated it quite well.
The other option would be to have
Fonts for Hindi
Fonts for Marathi
Fonts for Sanskrit
Fonts for Nepali
Fonts for Konkani
Fonts for Sindhi
Fonts for <some other language that I don't know about which is written in
devanagari script>
All of them pointing to devanagari.
It's a bit like asking French or Italian or Spanish or Indonesian or Malay users
to choose fonts for English rather than fonts for Latin/Roman script. Most
people would know that fonts for English would work for Malay as well, but it
does seem a bit awkward.

Comment 9

[Roy Yokoyama]

Comment on attachment 123628 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

/r=yokoyama

Comment 10

[Jungshik Shin]

Comment on attachment 123628 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

Thank you r/sr. Now asking for a1.4

There's very little code change here so that the risk is near nill. Most
changes are in properties file. This change is to reflect the reality that
Devanagari (the script) is used for multiple languages of India of which Hindi
is only one (albeit a widely used one). Making this change available in 1.4 is
to please Devanagari users who don't speak Hindi without offending Hindi
speakers.

The following two lines are not a part of the patch(slipped in from another
patch) and won't be committed.
+windows-874.LangGroup		    = th
+iso-8859-11.LangGroup		    = th

Comment 11

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Comment on attachment 123628 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

a=mkaply for checkin to 1.4

Please make a note in the checkin comment that this is a change to a DTD
(localized file)

Comment 12

[bobj]

r=bobj for UI change and L10N impact

Comment 13

[Jungshik Shin]

checked in the fix. Thanks all.