Future improvment in Mozilla 1.9

[Jean-Marc Desperrier]

The presentation of mozilla 1.9 in pavlov slides he presented in Japan
show some really interesting enhancement for i18n in Mozilla :
http://www.pavlov.net/random/japan.pdf

It shows :
- significant improvment for kannada and foremost arabic shapping, well
that's probably all composed characters that should be correctly handled
now.
- Support for soft hyphen
- kerning and ligature across DOM nodes, including when they are color
changes (somehow http://www.catch22.net/tuts/editor12.asp is still not
displayed correctly)
- better line breaking including a dictionnary for thai
_______________________________________________
dev-i18n mailing list
dev-i18n@...
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-i18n

[Tony Mechelynck]

Jean-Marc Desperrier wrote:
> The presentation of mozilla 1.9 in pavlov slides he presented in Japan
> show some really interesting enhancement for i18n in Mozilla :
> http://www.pavlov.net/random/japan.pdf
>
> It shows :
> - significant improvment for kannada and foremost arabic shapping, well
> that's probably all composed characters that should be correctly handled
> now.
[...]

Gecko 1.8 already supports correct placement of Hebrew/Arabic short vowels and
other diacritics *on Windows* but not on Linux. (I'm not sure about Mac.)

No improvement in the latest 1.9 (alpha) builds as shown by "Mozilla/5.0 (X11;
U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20061216 SeaMonkey/1.5a" (Build ID:
2006121601): to correctly display my frontpage
http://users.skynet.be/antoine.mechelynck/ on Linux, I have to use Konqueror.


Best regards,
Tony.
_______________________________________________
dev-i18n mailing list
dev-i18n@...
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-i18n

[Mike Cowperthwaite-2]

Tony Mechelynck wrote:
> Gecko 1.8 already supports correct placement of Hebrew/Arabic short
> vowels and other diacritics *on Windows* but not on Linux. (I'm not sure
> about Mac.)

Really?  On Windows 2000, Firefox 2.0 doesn't seem to do a good job with
the Arabic on that page -- or maybe that text is Persian?  I mean the
text that's to the left of your photo, below the Cyrillic.  (Opera 9
looks very good, altho I have no idea whether it's actually correct.)
_______________________________________________
dev-i18n mailing list
dev-i18n@...
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-i18n

[Tony Mechelynck]

Mike Cowperthwaite wrote:
> Tony Mechelynck wrote:
>> Gecko 1.8 already supports correct placement of Hebrew/Arabic short
>> vowels and other diacritics *on Windows* but not on Linux. (I'm not
>> sure about Mac.)
>
> Really?  On Windows 2000, Firefox 2.0 doesn't seem to do a good job with
> the Arabic on that page -- or maybe that text is Persian?  I mean the
> text that's to the left of your photo, below the Cyrillic.  (Opera 9
> looks very good, altho I have no idea whether it's actually correct.)

The text below the Cyrillic left of my photo is my name, transliterated into
vocalized Arabic as "ānṭuwān mahlank" and preceded by the preposition "min"
(from). I used to be able to see it correctly in Firefox 1.0.7 (IIRC) or in
IE6 when I was on Windows XP SP2. In Fx2 and Sm 1.5a1 on Linux I see the short
vowels "between" the consonants, rather than "above" them as they ought to be.
Konqueror "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror 3.4; Linux
2.6.11.4-21.14-default; X11; i686; en_US) KHTML 3.4.0 (like Gecko)" displays
the same text correctly.

The rest of the Arabic text on that page, i.e., "as-salaamu `alaykum" right of
the photo, and "you are the ...th visitor since the 17th day of January 2002
after the Birth" [of Jesus] lower down, which are unvocalized, display
correctly in all the browsers I tried (except Lynx).


Best regards,
Tony.
_______________________________________________
dev-i18n mailing list
dev-i18n@...
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-i18n

[Tony Mechelynck]

Someone replied to me privately but not on the newsgroup, with a from-address
of rkiddyr@... . That address is invalid. Please post on the newsgroup
instead.



Best regards,
Tony.
_______________________________________________
dev-i18n mailing list
dev-i18n@...
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-i18n

Tony Mechelynck wrote:
> Someone replied to me privately but not on the newsgroup, with a
> from-address of rkiddyr@... . That address is invalid. Please
> post on the newsgroup instead.
>
>
>
> Best regards,
> Tony.

That would have been me. I am rkiddy@....

I was seeking information about existing test cases of the i18n
functionality. I am being asked to do a sort of general survey. If
anyone has questions, ideas, or suggestions, I would be glad to chat.

I think that some things that are being done now, or that are available
now, would make this stuff much more testable and tested.

I am also on the IRC channels (#qa, #firefox, #bmo, #litmus, &c),
usually as "ray".

thanx - ray
_______________________________________________
dev-i18n mailing list
dev-i18n@...
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-i18n

[Tony Mechelynck]

rkiddyr@... wrote:

> Tony Mechelynck wrote:
>> Someone replied to me privately but not on the newsgroup, with a
>> from-address of rkiddyr@... . That address is invalid. Please
>> post on the newsgroup instead.
>>
>>
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Tony.
>
> That would have been me. I am rkiddy@....

I got your private "test" email, and just like this one, it still had the
wrong from-line. If I were you, I'd check my account settings for all "mail"
and "news" accounts. (In Thunderbird it's on the first page of settings for
each account.)

>
> I was seeking information about existing test cases of the i18n
> functionality. I am being asked to do a sort of general survey. If
> anyone has questions, ideas, or suggestions, I would be glad to chat.
>
> I think that some things that are being done now, or that are available
> now, would make this stuff much more testable and tested.
>
> I am also on the IRC channels (#qa, #firefox, #bmo, #litmus, &c),
> usually as "ray".
>
> thanx - ray

According to your private email to me, you may have come under the impression
that I had some authority with Mozilla. Let me dissipate this
misunderstanding: my only relation to Mozilla is that I use Firefox,
Thunderbird and SeaMonkey, and that I have had some activity on
bugzilla.mozilla.org (both as reporter and commenter) and also on some of the
present newsgroups (where my past training as math/physics teacher may have
shown as a tendency to "pedagogy" in my answers).

My worst gripe with i18n in Mozilla products is exhibited (AFAIK) only in
Linux but not in Windows (I don't know about Mac). In Linux itself, it's a
Gecko-only bug in the sense that Konqueror hasn't got it. It is described by
bug 81367 (reported in May of 2001 and still open), blocking bug 115713 (meta
bug on bidi layout issues).

The essence of it, is that on Linux (using GTK2+Xft, and probably also when
using GTK1) Firefox seems not to know that composing characters (such as,
among others, the short vowels of Hebrew and Arabic, which are not used in
most everyday texts but are used in sacred writings, in dictionaries, in
language lessons, and wherever they are necessary to prevent an ambiguity)
must be drawn "superimposed" to the preceding "spacing" character and not
"following" it. Bug 81367 has attachments (one in HTML which displays "wrong"
on Linux and one in JPG which displays "right" everywhere); my welcome page
http://users.skynet.be/antoine.mechelynck/ has text in several languages; the
Arabic text left of the photo (below the Russian and above the Chinese)
displays wrong on Gecko browsers on Linux, but not on Windows and, on Linux,
not in Konqueror. The rest of the Arabic text (right of the photo and on both
sides of the counter), which is not vocalised, displays correctly wherever I
have tested it.

IMHO this bug is making all Gecko browsers useless on Linux for any language
which uses composing characters: Biblical Hebrew and Koranic Arabic are the
best-known of these that come to mind. Undoubtedly there are others.

I have tried, without success, do do a screen capture of the "wrong" display
on this Linux+kde system. AFAICT, the PrintScreen key just does nothing.


Best regards,
Tony.
_______________________________________________
dev-i18n mailing list
dev-i18n@...
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-i18n

[Ricardo Palomares Martí­nez]

Tony Mechelynck escribió:
>
> I have tried, without success, do do a screen capture of the "wrong"
> display on this Linux+kde system. AFAICT, the PrintScreen key just does
> nothing.


KSnapshot will do the trick, IIRC. Also, The Gimp v2 has a capture
utility (File -> Adquire -> Screen Capture...; I'm retrotranslating
from spanish to english, so the wording may be slightly different).

HTH

--
If it's true that we are here to help others,
then what exactly are the OTHERS here for?
_______________________________________________
dev-i18n mailing list
dev-i18n@...
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-i18n

[Tony Mechelynck]

Ricardo Palomares Martinez wrote:

> Tony Mechelynck escribió:
>> I have tried, without success, do do a screen capture of the "wrong"
>> display on this Linux+kde system. AFAICT, the PrintScreen key just does
>> nothing.
>
>
> KSnapshot will do the trick, IIRC. Also, The Gimp v2 has a capture
> utility (File -> Adquire -> Screen Capture...; I'm retrotranslating
> from spanish to english, so the wording may be slightly different).
>
> HTH
>

KSnapshot works like a charm, thanks. Here are a couple of shots:
- Firefox (aka BonEcho):
http://users.skynet.be/antoine.mechelynck/other/arabbad.png
- Konqueror:
http://users.skynet.be/antoine.mechelynck/other/arabgood.png

Notice how the Arabic text left of the photo is broken (interrupted) in
Firefox (bad) but not in Konqueror (good).

Both these shots are of the same web page,
http://users.skynet.be/antoine.mechelynck/index.htm


Best regards,
Tony.
_______________________________________________
dev-i18n mailing list
dev-i18n@...
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-i18n