1615558 - Private use characters (End user defined characters) not rendering in Firefox browser.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

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

Description

[vulchi.vijay]

Attachment: chrome-firefox_private_character_rending.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.100 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I have web application, end users can create their own fonts through private character editor (EUDC) and saved as "link with all fonts", Those fonts not rending in chrome and Firefox. The same fonts are rending in IE and Edge. Is there a way to fix the issue in Firefox?

Actual results:

I am using utf-8, i am sharing my use case link

https://codepen.io/vulchivijay/pen/ZEGbKBg?editors=1100

we can see boxes in chrome/Firefox browser, but edge its render properly (because i am testing EDUC created machine)

Expected results:

EUDC characters should display properly in Firefox i believe.

Comment 1

[Gingerbread Man]

What fonts are supposed to be used with your testcase? You don't specify any fonts that can handle those characters and none are installed in Windows 10 by default.

Comment 2

[vulchi.vijay]

Hi Gingerbread Man,

I created a special character using private character editor in windows 10 OS saved that as link to all fonts, that means this special character should render in any font family (which are available in windows OS) even font-family: arial also supports to display it in IE and Edge. I can not see exact character in Chrome and Firefox (This is my use case).

Comment 3

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Firefox does not support Windows EUDC font linkage (and nor does Chrome, apparently). Using such fonts would result in content that is not reliably interoperable on the web, as the interpretation of the text becomes dependent on the configuration of the user's local system.

To display private use area characters, you need to explicitly specify the font (e.g. load your desired font using @font-face, and set the font-family property for the content that's using the PUA codepoints). I believe this is the only way to reliably use Private Use codepoints to display text on the web.

Comment 4

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Given the interoperability hazard, as well as the fact that Blink doesn't support this either, I'm closing this as WONTFIX.