OpenType Layout Language Tags

[Damjan Georgievski]

I'm reposting this here too, since mozilla.dev.i18n seems to be abandoned
since last year...

My question is about the support for the "OpenType Layout Language Tags" in
Firefox when using OpenType fonts on Linux.

The thing is, there's a slight difference between russian and macedonian
cyrillics, more precisely 5 characters in their italic variant, look
different. So some fonts, like for ex. the "DejaVu Serif"(1) font, support
the "OpenType Layout Language Tags" feature, in which there are separate
glyph for each unicode character, tagged with the language.

Any rendering engine should select the glyph based on the content language
or user locale (or preference).

For example,
pango-view --font="DejaVu Serif Italic" --text="б г д п т" --language=ru
pango-view --font="DejaVu Serif Italic" --text="б г д п т" --language=mk
will show slight differences in the rendering.

SO, the question is, how can I make Firefox 3.0 display the correct
rendering of these macedonian cyrillic italic letters? It's using Pango on
Linux so it should be possible.

I've made a test page with an image rendering from pango, and html text.
http://damjan.softver.org.mk/italic.html
It's in macedonian, but the important difference is in the red rectangle
(the letters as rendered by the browser) and the green rectangle (an
image).

ps
There's a bug from 2000 about this:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24139

Does this mean there haven't been any progress at all on this issue?

--
damjan