232931 - − should render as –, not a hyphen, if no special minus glyph is available

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, defect)

Description

[stevenj]

User-Agent:       
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113

On systems like the MacOS, where there is no special glyph for the minus sign,
− renders as a hyphen (-).  An en dash (–) would be a much closer
fit, and I seem to recall it being the one recommended in e.g. Mac typography
guides.  A hyphen, on the other hand, is too short in most fonts.

This is something I first noticed in math pages on Wikipedia (e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion) where people were using −.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
create a web page with − for minus signs
Actual Results:  
got a hyphen glyph on MacOS

Expected Results:  
expected a longer dash, e.g. an –

Comment 1

[rbs]

This happens due the way the transliteration fallback works. Currently, glyphs
without fonts cannot be translitaterate to yet another Unicode point. They can
only be transliterated to ASCII -- which is certain to have a font.
 
Consequently, the − is transliterated to something close in the ASCII set.
And '-' is the closest.

It will be much work to redesign the transliteration system (with ramifications
into platform codes to further deal with missing glyphs even after the
transliteration). Suggesting wontfix, knowing that transliteration is a
desperate fallback, and people can install fonts, and this saves from further
bloat/complexity to Gecko in the belief that it should be responsible for
every/anything.

Comment 2

[Jungshik Shin]

I agree with rbs. 

Comment 3

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

*** Bug 236160 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
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Comment 5

[stevenj]

Attachment: short .html file showing hyphen, minus, and ndash glyphs

Comment 6

[stevenj]

This still occurs in Firefox 1.0.7, but I guess this is expected from the
"wontfix" tag.