Mozilla Firefox will support Graphite technology from SIL International

The Graphite technology developed by SIL International consists in supplementing the TrueType font with three additional data tables describing the features of the writing system. The rules embedded in the font describe the changes of characters depending on the context: these are ligatures, character substitution, auto-substitution of characters, symbol permutations, binding of accents, kerning, increasing the width of characters through lengthening horizontal strokes, and so on. Graphite code interpreting these rules is distributed freely (under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License and the Common Public License).

The meaning of Graphite is that knowledge of the features of the writing system (for example, such as changing the form of Arabic consonants depending on their position in the word: at the beginning, in the middle, at the end of the word, separate; similar features in Asian languages ​​are many, I brought only the most well-known) and taking into account all these features is not assigned to each individual program (such as a browser or document editor), and even not to the library used to display fonts (such as Graphite), but is placed directly by the author of the font but in the font.

The efforts to internationalize this or that software (the authors of which can live on the opposite side of the planet and know nothing not only about the written language, but also about the very existence of some small people) are thus reduced to simply using the font needed by the users; it is assumed that the font developer is much more familiar with the features of the writing whose letters draws and describes metadata.
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The Graphite library was created for Windows and was later ported to Linux, but not to Mac OS X (according to SIL, Apple's Advanced Typography technology already has similar properties). Graphite support is available in text editors such as SIL WorldPad , XeTeX, OpenOffice.org (from version 3.2, except on Macs) and LibreOffice (again, not on Macs). Graphite support can also be added to all applications on Linux (using pango-graphite ) and on Windows (the MultiScribe project is still experimental and does not work in all versions of Windows).

In December of the current (2011) year, support for Graphite was added to the Mozilla Firefox browser code (see bug 631479 ); If we consider the schedule , then its appearance in the release should be expected in the spring of 2012.