I got firefox running with pango support. It would have been much easier if I were using Fedora Core 3. All I had to do was run:

$ MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO=1 firefox

That would have enabled pango support in firefox. But, no! I use Debian GNU/Linux and am in love with it. Then I also thought about all the people who are not using FC3 as their distribution (even FC2 people) and how they still don't have firefox 1.0 with pango support. Then I decided to build firefox with pango support.

I downloaded latest source code from www.mozilla.org and applied the pango patch from the FC3 source rpm (I thought that was the easiest thing to do :)). Next I made a small change not to check for MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO and enable pango by default. Then compiled firefox with default firefox build settings + gtk2 + xft + pango.

It renders Indian language text (I can read Telugu and Hindi) nicely although selection and cursor placement are still not working correctly. Chistopher Blizzard has already made progress on it. Here is the screenshot:


One does not have to set any environmental variables to enable pango support in this build. It is enabled by default! Download the firefox build with pango (source tarball from which it has been built is here)