1237427 - In Urdu Wikipedia the Arabic letters HEH GOAL (U+0651, ہ) and HEH DOACHASHMEE (U+06BE, ھ) are rendered incorrectly

Status: NEW

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

Description

[Amir Aharoni]

I am reading the following two articles in the Urdu Wikipedia on Mac OSX El Capitan, Firefox 43.0.3:

* https://ur.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%B6%D9%84%D8%B9_%DB%81%D8%B1%DB%8C_%D9%BE%D9%88%D8%B1 (Haripur District)
* https://ur.wikipedia.org/wiki/%DA%AF%DA%BE%D9%88%DA%91%D8%A7_%DA%AF%D9%84%DB%8C (Ghora Gali)

Both of them have variants of the letter Heh in their titles - HEH GOAL (U+0651, ہ) and HEH DOACHASHMEE (U+06BE, ھ). They are rendered incorrectly on Firefox, but correctly on Chrome 47 on the same machine.

Comment 1

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

I think this is because Firefox's default 'serif' font for Arabic script is configured as Al Bayan, which doesn't support all the extended-Arabic letters; therefore, fallback kicks in for the Urdu HEH variants, finds Geeza Pro instead, and shaping breaks across the font-run boundaries.

If you go to Preferences / Content / Fonts & Colors / Advanced..., and reconfigure the fonts for Arabic script so as to use Geeza Pro as the 'serif' face, the problem should go away.

Maybe we should make that the default, for wider coverage; however, it means we'd lose any distinction between 'serif' and 'sans-serif' for Arabic script. (That seems to be the case in Chrome...)