797662 - Ship a font that can display Khmer web content

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Mathieu Pellerin]

(Following commits within bug 619521, and linked to bug 648548)

To this day, Android doesn't ship any default font for Khmer script. Firefox for Android - as of version 17 - supports rendering of Khmer script, as long as pages embed a web font. It'd be nice for the users to be offered the possibility of easily downloading a Khmer font to fully enable Khmer rendering (i.e. touch.facebook.com, etc.).

That'd certainly be a huge boost to help firefox adoption over here in Cambodia.

Comment 1

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

I see people on Google Play saying they can't find Khmer despite our release notes saying it shipped. I see we shipped Khmer. Does modern Android still not have any proper font?

Comment 2

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

This was in reference to feedback on Firefox Beta (33) and bug 1056785.

Comment 3

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

I don't see ភាសាខ្មែរ in my locale picker on my HTC One. I do see a different rendition in content, where we use Clear Sans.

Shipping fonts for Android UI is hard; we essentially rely on OEMs to do so. Rooted users can install fonts from Play. That's not a great situation, but I don't know if we can do better.

Comment 4

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Also, I think there are two bugs here.

Aaron's talking about the locale picker. Locales won't show up there unless Android ships a font that can render the locale's name. I don't believe they do. There's not too much we can do about that.

The original reporter is talking about shipping a web content font that can display Khmer.

Let's keep this bug as the latter.

It *might* be fixed; I'm not sure if Clear Sans is a good Khmer font.

Mathieu: is the situation improved since 2012?

Comment 5

[Mathieu Pellerin]

This bug was created following a discussion with Jonathan Kew when he was working on a feature to allow for additional fonts to be loaded when placed in the Firefox user's profile directory. It's not about having Firefox place an additional font in Android's system file. The user profile directory solution was created to prevent a) need for root, and b) need to rely on OEMs.

Since the original discussions, there has been talks (which I'm not privy to) of creating an automated mechanism to offer users to download fonts when Firefox detects a unicode range that isn't covered by the currently loaded fonts. I don't know the status of that.

In the meantime, I (and others) have created Firefox add-ons to place a Khmer (or other script) font into the user profile directory. It's not ideal as it requires more steps by the users, but it helps.

As for the general Khmer support in Android, we've made progress since 2012. As of Android 4.2, Khmer script rendering is supported, and Android ships (I believe since 4.4) its Droid font with Khmer support. That said, if you look at the % of Android 4.4 penetration, its still very low, so a Khmer support offered within Firefox is still very important.

Comment 6

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.