Jordi: I understand what you are saying. But one of my main points was that people don’t browse the net with just one font. Even if a user does set a non‐ligature version of DejaVu as his default font, he will in his browsing constantly encounter pages that request and use other fonts that may be rendered brokenly.
So while shipping with a non‐ligature version of DejaVu does somewhat alleviate the Firefox problem, in a way it does not go far enough. It pains me to say so, but as long as the Firefox rendering is broken, maybe the cleanest way would be to disable rendering of Latin‐script ligatures at the Pango level? Justified Devanagari in Firefox would of course still be broken then, and there would be no ligatures anywhere on the desktop. In other words, the same situation as in Breezy. The only real solution will be for Firefox’s Pango handling to be fixed once and for all, but it seems highly unlikely now that this will happen in time for Dapper.
Jordi: I understand what you are saying. But one of my main points was that people don’t browse the net with just one font. Even if a user does set a non‐ligature version of DejaVu as his default font, he will in his browsing constantly encounter pages that request and use other fonts that may be rendered brokenly.
So while shipping with a non‐ligature version of DejaVu does somewhat alleviate the Firefox problem, in a way it does not go far enough. It pains me to say so, but as long as the Firefox rendering is broken, maybe the cleanest way would be to disable rendering of Latin‐script ligatures at the Pango level? Justified Devanagari in Firefox would of course still be broken then, and there would be no ligatures anywhere on the desktop. In other words, the same situation as in Breezy. The only real solution will be for Firefox’s Pango handling to be fixed once and for all, but it seems highly unlikely now that this will happen in time for Dapper.