Re: Rendering of ellipsis for different scripts

Jean-Marc Desperrier <[email protected]> Sat, 03 Nov 2007 02:01:02 +0100
Newsgroups gmane.comp.mozilla.internationalization
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Damjan Georgievski wrote:
>> No, the purpose of Unicode is to encode abstract characters, that are
>> recognised as representing the same element, but can have very various
>> graphical representations (glyphs) depending on both context and language.
> ... 
>> If you want a nice display, you need to carry that language an cultural
>> preferences information into your display engine.
> 
> Does Firefox do this today? - on Linux? 
> How about Firefox 3?

It does it for the web content, but not for the interface where it uses 
what it's told to do by the "OS" (more precisely by components in the 
GUI layer that in some case are not fully part of the OS)

> I ask this because we have a similar problem, different glyphs for cyrillic
> itallic letters in macedonian/serbian vs russian/bulgarian (I don't know
> for other languages).

It sounds worth investigating, but I'm not an expert on this.
If I understand correctly, macedonian/serbian are cyrillic, so what 
encoding is used for them ?
If it's the same encoding as for russian/bugarian, it makes things hard.
It could still be handled by adding a LANG attribute with the proper 
code (mk, sr), and separating the current cyrillic setting in the option 
into "cyrillic (russia/bulgaria)" and "cyrillic (macedonia/serbia)" to 
allow setting different fonts for the two (tradionnal chines is already 
similarly separated in two)

> Also, does anyone know of a tool I could use to inspect if the font has
> language specific glyphs?

It's supposed to work by selecting the font according to the language, 
not by selecting language specific glyphs inside the font.