Ever since support for bidirectional languages was implemented in Mozilla by me and my colleagues at IBM. and through all the improvements and bug-fixes that have been made since, one thing that we never got quite right was text with diacritics, aka nikkud, aka harakat, especially in justified text. This was a real obstacle in the way of my recommending Mozilla or Firefox to my friends, many of whom heavily use sites like Mechon Mamre that feature vocalized Hebrew.
I am happy to say that this is now fixed in trunk builds and the beta of Firefox 3 that will appear RSN. Here are some screenshots of a chapter from Mechon Mamre. Since they are in Hebrew, the “before” shots are on the right, and the “after” shots on the left. Click on the images to see full-size versions.
Linux
OSX
Windows
Uri B | 28-Oct-07 at 10:04 am | Permalink
Woo-hoo! Congrats on getting this fixed for all platforms. It was certainly worth waiting for!
Amir Aharoni | 28-Oct-07 at 10:23 am | Permalink
Oh yeah. Congratulations. And big thanks.
There’s one weird part … I believe that i read somewhere that for the Windows version Mozilla developers used Microsoft’s Unicode libraries. When i read that, i was somewhat disappointed that Firefox will depend on non-free code and afraid that the problem will be only fixed on Windows. But now i see that it is fixed on Linux, too. Which raises the question – Why did you have to use Microsoft’s libraries, if there’s free code for Linux that does it?
I’m probably wrong or terribly inaccurate somewhere in my questions, so please correct me.
P.S. How can i type with nikkud on Fedora?..
Talmida | 30-Oct-07 at 3:33 pm | Permalink
Nicely done! I can stop hopping over to Explorer every time I need pointed text!