470503 - The ɔ́ is actually one character. Firefox shows it as two.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 404848

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

Description

[Gerard Meijssen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; nl-NL; rv:1.9.1b2) Gecko/20081201 Firefox/3.1b2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; nl-NL; rv:1.9.1b2) Gecko/20081201 Firefox/3.1b2

Hoi,
African languages are not doing well at all in Wikipedia. One of the reasons is usability. When text just do not look good people do not bother. When you look at my user page, you will see that Firefox CAN show it properly.

Safari is able to show it correctly. This bug prevents the proper use of African languages on Wikipedia. Please help.
Thanks,
    Gerard Meijssen
    User:GerardM
    member of the Wikimedia Foundation's language commission

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. In edit mode, any page where a character like ɔ́ is present



Expected Results:  
The ɔ́ should be one character.

There are two things to this, there is the browser behaviour that makes things go wrong and there is the configuration of the webserver. GMAIL works fine with this character, Blogger and MediaWiki are not.

Comment 1

[Gerard Meijssen]

I tested this against the 3.0 and the 3.1 version of FF.
Thanks,
    GerardM

Comment 2

[Jo Hermans]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20081219 Shiretoko/3.1b3pre

I can see it as 1 character on the tab-bar of this bug (not the title bar of he window, that's a Windows bug), inside the bold title at the top of this page and inside the content of <http://ln.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilisateur:GerardM>. But not at the top of this page (the first one, not the bold one), not inside comment 0, and not on the page mentioned in the url-field (which is the "edit" page).

It depends on the font that was used - some have the correct character, some don't. Note that Gecko does all this fancy substitution stuff, where characters form different fonts are borrowed in order to display a character not present in a particular font. But it doesn't work on all combinations (for instance the fixed width font).

Note that I'm using the universal auto-detect, and it has chosen UTF-8 every time.

Comment 3

[philippe (part-time)]

This is highly interesting:
1. With a default profile, the character displays correctly everywhere (chrome and content part, also in the textarea linked in comment 0)
2. If I change the setting for 'monospace' in Preferences > Content > Fonts & Colors to 'DejaVu Sans Mono' (default is 'courier'), then I see two characters in comment 0.
(and 
3. If I use my user stylesheet, it fails as well...)

Gecko seems to have a problem with font fall back with this particular case.
Testing the same with Safari on the same machine (running OS X 10.5.6) works correctly all the time.

Comment 4

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Marking duplicate of bug 404848, since this was reported against Windows, but see also bug 425650 (Mac) and bug 425651 (Linux)