164891 - Malayalam language font does not display correctly

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Internationalization, defect)

Description

[ap2d2g]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826

The site http://www.manoramaonline.com uses dynamic fonts, which did not work.
So, as the site's FAQ instructed, I downloaded and installed the font and
changed the character coding to user-defined. Now, some letters show corectly
but not all.

IE6 renders the malayalam language site correctly.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Navigate to http://www.manoramaoline.com
2. Go to FAQ link at the bottom of the page
3. Download and install font (did not work eith mozilla. did with IE6)
4. Restarted Mozilla after changing character-coding to user-defined
5. Navigate to http://www.manoramaoline.com

Actual Results:  
? is displayed instead of the actutal letter for many alphabets.

Expected Results:  
Ofcourse, should have displaed correctly :-)

Comment 1

[R.K.Aa.]

changing component

Comment 2

[Yuying Long]

Notice the meta charset is x-user-defined.

Comment 3

[Jungshik Shin]

> Steps to Reproduce:
> 1. Navigate to http://www.manoramaoline.com
> 2. Go to FAQ link at the bottom of the page
> 3. Download and install font (did not work eith mozilla. did with IE6)
> 4. Restarted Mozilla after changing character-coding to user-defined
> 5. Navigate to http://www.manoramaoline.com

  Just setting View|Character Coding to user-define is not enough. You have
to set fonts to use for UserDefined to Malayalam fonts you have downloaded
and installed in Edit|Preferences|Appearance|Fonts|User-Defined. Given this,
I guess this is invalid.

BTW, Mozilla-Win under Win2k/XP can render Indic scripts in UTF-8 well with
opentype fonts.
Therefore, those pages in x-user-defined had better switch over to UTF-8 asap.

Comment 4

[ap2d2g]

I tried the UTF-8 setting and changed the Font preferences to "Use font for 
Unicode".

The problem persists.

The problem seems to be that Mozilla renders many of the characters in the font 
as "?" instead of the actual character. Certain letters are readable though.

Comment 5

[Jungshik Shin]

According to you(I couldn't go to the page myself), the page in question is NOT
in UTF-8 BUT in 
x-user-defined. Therefore, setting to UTF-8 does NOT work. How could that work? 

Comment 6

[ap2d2g]

It doesn't work in any setting - UTF-8, Userdefined etc. It tries to render the 
font, some of them ge displayed, the others show up as '?'. 

Thomas

Comment 7

[Jungshik Shin]

I finally tried http://147.208.184.88/ after installing Manorama font.
As far as I can see, the page is rendered well. 

repoerter, did you follow the instruction given in comment #3? Here's the recap.

1. Install the font
2. Start mozilla
3. Go to Edit | Preference | Appearance | Fonts
4. Select 'User-Defined'
5. Set all four font categories (Seris, Sans-Serif, Fantasy and Monospace)
   to the Mallayalam font you've just installed
6. Save the setting
7. Go to Malayalam online page
8. Go to View | Character Coding and select 'User-defined'.

And, if it works, please write to the maintainer of the site and update the FAQ.
The answer given there is inadequate because it mentions only the last(8th step)
above. 

With only that step (and font installation) taken, neither MS IE nor Netscape
4.x can works. 

Kat, next time we update i18n rel. notes, we may have to include a link to this
or something similar. How to view pages in 'user-defined' with 'hack encoded
truetype font' is  a frequently asked question and it'll continue to be until
all the Indic scripts are supported properly. It's not just Mozilla but other
system components (OS APIs, fonts, rendering libraries) that have to be worked on. 

In particular case of Malayalam, Uniscribe (under MS Windows) doesn't support it
yet although MacOS X may support it (even if Mac OS X does, Mozilla/Camino
doesn't take advantage of Mac OS X's ATSUI, yet so that it can't render pages in
Malayalam in UTF-8. It's bug 205476). Given this, we can't expect pages in
'user-defined' to go away very soon. 

Comment 8

[Frank Tang]

I think both roy and me are off mozilla for more than 2 years. If these bugs are
still here now, I think the real stauts is 'won't fix'. If you want to reopen
it, please find a new owner for it first. 

Comment 9

[Travis Chase]

Mass Reassign Please excuse the spam

Comment 10

[Travis Chase]

Mass Re-opening Bugs Frank Tang Closed on Wensday March 02 for no reason, all
the spam is his fault feel free to tar and feather him

Comment 11

[Travis Chase]

Reassigning Franks old bugs to Jungshik Shin for triage - Sorry for spam

Comment 12

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

*** Bug 125899 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 13

[Jo Hermans]

*** Bug 296807 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 14

[Biju]

You can use "Padma" to automatically switch to unicode 
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/873

I wish Firefox would incorporate feature provided by Padma builtin.
Or ask to install Padma if user ever visited such sites

if you need the cool Anjali Font you can download from
https://sites.google.com/site/cibu/

Comment 15

[Rigin Oommen]

Try the malayalam version of mozilla firefox

https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-25.0&os=win&lang=ml

Comment 16

[Gordon P. Hemsley [:GPHemsley]]

I would venture to guess the situation here is very different now than it was in 2002. The link in the URL field works for me, so resolving the bug as WFM.

If this is still a problem, it might be better to open a new bug.