Regional language (Indic scripts / Complex scripts) support in Fedora

The following instructions have been tested to work correctly only for Devnaagarii script.

To enable Indic support, you need two things:

1. A font having Indic character definitions
2. A 'complex script' rendering engine

The first part is taken care of by the Arial Unicode MS font (see my Windows fonts tutorial). The complex script rendering engine in Fedora is called pango. I dont't kno about other applications, but its certainly required for Mozilla/Firefox.

Now Firefox can be 'built' from its source code either with the pango engine, or without it. The ordinary version that you download has been compiled WITHOUT pango. And although the source code is freely available for everyone to comiple, trust me, trying to compile it yourself is no easy task.

A better option is to use whichever version of Firefox that came with your Fedora installation.Such versions (1.5.0.7, in my case, on FC6) have been compiled using the pango engine, and that should make your task easier. However, you must take care to see to it that you use the older version only when you need Indic support. Older versions can have security vulnerabilities that can put your computer/data at risk.

A thing I consider extremely worthwhile mentioning is that multiple versions of Firefox can peacefully co-exist under Fedora. All you need to do is keep them in separate folders. You can make the default link poin to the latest version, and run the old version manually by executing

$ FIREFOX_HOME/firefox

where FIREFOX_HOME is the directory where your old Firefox installation resides. In my case it is /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.7

That done, you should be able to view regional scripts (Indic) correctly...!