110655 - mac osx: Can't set any Hebrew or Arabic fonts, although appropriate fonts are installed in the system

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

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

Description

[Shoshannah Forbes]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:0.9.5+)
Gecko/20011116
BuildID:    2001111609

In the prefrences, all font types for the Hebrew language are unavablibe, so I
can't select a Hebrew font.
I do Have a Hebrew font in my system (and unicode fonts with Hebrew glyphs as well)

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open Mozilla on Mac OS X
2. Go into the font prefrences
3. Choose "Hebrew"

Actual Results:  I can only choose Serif or Sans serif, but not the typface

Expected Results:  To be able to select a Hebrew typface from my system

Comment 1

[Shoshannah Forbes]

Attachment: A screen shot of the DB

Comment 2

[Greg K.]

Shoshannah, can you still reproduce this problem under 0.9.6?

Comment 3

[Shoshannah Forbes]

Tried with build ID 2001112108 and the bug is still there

Comment 4

[Dave Vasilevsky]

I am experiencing the same problem, with Mozilla 0.9.6. Hebrew text still
displays fine, and even uses a serif/sans-serif font according to the selection
in the font preferences, I just can't choose which font myself.

Comment 5

[Frank Tang]

I think this will got fixed once we fix 116976 and 116982

Comment 6

[Frank Tang]

It is not related to 116976,116982. It is due to that MacOS X do not instll
Arabic / Hebrew script. 

Comment 7

[Frank Tang]

give to nhotta. we need to enhance our font enumeration code to look at the OS/2
table in the font. 

Comment 8

[Shoshannah Forbes]

this bug is getting annoying- for some reason the latest build decided to
display all the hebrew as ranana bold italic, and now I can't change it. hmmph...

Comment 9

[Shoshannah Forbes]

More information:
It seems that mozilla on OSX uses the first font it finds which has Hebrew 
glyphs in it (not any random font).
However, since the system font (Lucida grande) of the final OSX (unlike the 
beta) does not include the cmap for Hebrew, what font will be used becomes 
unpredictible.
Very very annoying.

Comment 10

[Shoshannah Forbes]

Any news here? This bug is really ugly for a 1.0 product. It is a shame I have 
to give people workarounds so they can view web pages with a decent font and 
the not the font mozilla deiceds to use.

Comment 11

[Shoshannah Forbes]

*** Bug 156180 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[Shoshannah Forbes]

As mentioned in the dup bug: under osx 10.2 (which officially has Hebrew
support). all the options (except for serif ans sans serif) for Hebrew fonts are
unavalbile.
See attached screen shot

Comment 13

[Shoshannah Forbes]

Attachment: The db under osx 10.2

Comment 14

[Shoshannah Forbes]

any news here? this is *the* most asked about bug for mozilla on osx.

Comment 15

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

*** Bug 175332 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 16

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Adjusting summary to subsume bug 175332.

Comment 17

[Shoshannah Forbes]

*** Bug 179037 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 18

[Shoshannah Forbes]

Two more comments:

* The font used in this case is Lucida Grande, which does not have a bold
variant.  The meaning: No Hebrew text appears bold (data loss?) even when it should.
A partial workaound: I found that if I replace the system's Arial (which does
not contain Hebrew, as the Hebrew version is a seprate font) with the Windows
2000 TTF Arial, Mozilla uses it for all Hebrew pages (and it does contain bold)

* This bug affects other Geko browsers very severly. For example, Netscape 7.0.1
on osx (Jaguar 10.2.3) has it's western font at 14 points. For somereason, it
insist on displaying Hebrew about 5 point... As The whole Hebrew section is
disabled due to this bug, the user can not set the Hebrew font size or minimum
font size, and has to resize the font manully for that page (and then the
western fonts are way to big).

This bug affect Chimera as well.

Comment 19

[Shoshannah Forbes]

Attachment: How this bug affect Netscape. Once this bug is fixed, that problem is easly solvble.

Comment 20

[rbs]

Nominating as 1.4 blocker and for nsbeta1 consideration.

The bug deserves a higher priority because:
1) how are users supposed to use the browser if they can't set decent
fonts with which to view pages:
screenshot: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=58343&action=view
            http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=92895&action=view
            http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=111028&action=view

2) No doubt that it wouldn't last a day and would have been a smoketest blocker
if it was English.

=======
The list of fonts is already available to the UI, and trying to detect which one
is serif/sans-serif/monospace/fantasy is unreliable and is returning bogus
results. That's why the drop-downs are empty (which is not the same as saying
that the user has no fonts). Looking at the problem from a XP perspective, bug
142511 comment 6 suggested to always show all the fonts while grouping them to
add some elegance. However, if time/resources don't permit grouping, the
all-font-list (which is already available to the UI) could be shown instead of
an empty drop-down.

Comment 21

[Samir Gehani]

adt: nsbeta1-

Comment 22

[rbs]

I have a fix for this in bug 142511.

Comment 23

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

We really should try to get this for 1.4. Smontagu, can you take a look at this? 

Comment 24

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Based on comment 22, why not just press for someone (jag? shliang?) to review
bug 142511?

Comment 25

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

142511 is approved to land.

Comment 26

[rbs]

Fixed via bug 142511.

Comment 27

[Shoshannah Forbes]

v.
Althogh there are still major problems- see bug #120401

Comment 28

[Shoshannah Forbes]

btw, althugh this is fixed with mozilla, it is broken in firebird. See bug #206780