Pango: Iceweasel vs. Chrome

[Girish Kulkarni <girish@hri.res.in>]

Hi,

I decided to go ahead and try Google Chrome (4.0.249.43) on my laptop,
which runs Lenny.  My usual browser is Iceweasel (3.0.6).

A pleasant surprise in Chrome was a much better rendering of the
Devanagari script:

   http://athene.org.in/girish/pango.html

Iceweasel leaves gaps in ligatures and places letters unevenly so that
text in Hindi or Marathi, for instance, looks ugly.  Both browsers use
Pango to render Indic scripts.  (Same font is used in the above
example.)  Could someone please explain why the difference then?

Remarkably, the Iceweasel version that came with Etch used to render
Devanagari well.  Exactly like Chrome here.  Since Iceweasel is my
preferred browser otherwise, I wonder if there's something I can do to
improve Devanagari rendering in it?

Thanks,
Girish.

--
Girish Kulkarni - Allahabad, India - http://athene.org.in/girish