[OLPC India] Marathi Font help + Glyph alignment feedback

[Jim Gettys]

On Fri, 2007-11-02 at 00:42 +0530, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-10-18 at 00:29 +0200, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> > Jim Gettys wrote:
> > > Marco will be working on building a new version of the web browser very
> > > soon.  Support for Arabic and a number of other complex scripts has just
> > > "landed" in Firefox (on which our browser is based), and high on our
> > > list of things to do next is to update the browser.
> > >                               - Jim
> > >
> > >   
> 
> Hi all,
> I got a B4 system today, and did some testing after upgrading to joyride
> build 190. Here are my feedback/reports
> 
> 1) The partial rendering (seen the en.wikipedia's Devanagari page) with
> Browse has indeed been fixed. Thanks Marco :-)

Cool.  Please check other scripts and be sure Behdad knows if you find
any rendering problems.

> 
> 2) It looks like the corrupt fontconfig cache issue remains - the UI was
> not able to pick up fonts with Devanagari coverage automatically. (Eg:
> The journal showed boxes with codepoints after I used Browse to visit a
> page with Hindi titles). Deleting the cache and regenerating them seems
> to work. This may be an issue with fontconfig itself -
> http://abock.org/2007/11/01/font-sadness/ sounds vaguely familiar :-)

Yes, fontconfig should be able to know it needs to redo its cache
automatically (unless the dates on the font files are broken); this does
sound like a fontconfig bug.  Fontconfig is a freedesktop project;
looking at bugs upstream there may determine if it has been fixed
(presuming all the dates on font files are correct).

Whether we are regenerating the cache as part of the image build is not
at all clear.

> 
> 3) In Write activity, split vowels signs (they are found in two major
> scripts, Bengali (bn) and Malayalam (ml)) are sometimes being rendered
> incorrectly. Instead of splitting the vowel sign up and placing the the
> base consonant _in between_, in some cases, Write is rendering the split
> vowel sign after the base consonant.
> I would do some more investigation on this and if required file a ticket
> (it may be entirely possible that I'm doing something really stupid :-)
> 
> Warm regards,
> Sayamindu
> 
> 
> 
-- 
Jim Gettys
One Laptop Per Child