On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 15:41 +0600, Christopher Fynn wrote:

Language specific rendering *can* be achieved using OpenType lookups - but, even if the font contains the necessary language specific lookups (and most don't), for this feature to function correctly the system somehow needs to know which language is being used. This cannot always be determined by current locale, the keyboard/IME used to type the text, or from the range of Unicode characters involved so especially with multilingual documents you need users to reliably mark up text. Language then needs to be indicated by some high-level form of mark-up or tagging within the documents - which right away excludes plain text.

Setting locale is actually enough. If that's not desired, $PANGO_LANGUAGE can be set as a fallback. So far seems like most of the issues happen because either the users are not setting locale correctly or are using crappy fonts. How do I don't care enough about those cases I'm not surprised.

• Chris