1101550 - Incorrect font selected for unified Han character in untagged content

Status: NEW

(Core :: Graphics: Text, defect)

Description

[Simon Sapin (:SimonSapin)]

Attachment: Screenshot of Firefox and Chromium showing http://tangorin.com/kanji/%E6%99%B4

On my Archlinux machine, in http://tangorin.com/kanji/%E6%99%B4 (a Japanese dictionary website) as well as in the address bar, the character 晴 U+6674 is rendered with 円 instead of 月 as the bottom right part, which my Japanese teacher says is wrong.

Devtools show that the Baekmuk Dotum font is used. It seems to be a Korean font. I suppose this appearance is correct in Korean, and this issue is a result of Unicode’s Han unification.

Adding lang="ja" to the markup fixes the issue (by using a different font). Given Han unification, that’s clearly the correct solution, so feel free to close this bug. Still, I’m curious. What do we do to pick a font for unified characters when the language is not tagged? What part of the code is responsible for this choice? Blink seems to be doing something different, since Chromium gives a result that’s locally better for the same untagged content.