174324 - Site rendered incorrectly

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 52746

(Core :: Internationalization, defect)

Description

[Kedar P Bhise]

This site shows up as garbage in Mozilla. The site home page says:
"This site is available in Dynamic Font.
You do not need to download and install the font to view the site.

However if your browser doesnt support dynamic fonts
or if you face any problems in viewing the contents,
please download the MillenniumVarun font from here.
( Install MILLENNIUMVARUN.TTF font to your windows/fonts folder.) "

Does Mozilla support Dynamic Fonts? I tried installing the font, the page still
does not render correctly.

One issue though: the page is in Devnagari script, which is an Indian script.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Mozilla does not support dynamic fonts... We should support Devnagari, however...

Comment 2

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Downloading the font works for me, at least on Windows.

After installing the downloaded font, go to Edit | Preferences | Appearance |
Fonts, choose User Defined in the "Fonts For" list box, and MilleniumVarun in
either the "Serif" or "Sans Serif" list box (whichever is selected in the
Proportional list box.

After doing all that I see the font used in the site. I don't read Devanagari
well enough to know if what is displayed is correct or garbage, but the glyphs
are Devanagari glyphs.

This doesn't count as "supporting" Devanagari, of course.

Comment 3

[Kedar P Bhise]

I tried the suggestion from Simon Montagu about changing settings in the Fonts
preferences, and they worked. The site is being rendered correctly after the
settings change.
Thanks, Simon.

One question though: Should we have to do this? Or should the font show up
automatically once it is installed correctly?

Issues with supporting Devnagari: There are many special fonts, and each of them
use different means to create the same character on screen. This might cause
problems.

Comment 4

[Kedar P Bhise]

If I change the preferences as per Simon Montagu's suggestion, I get problems
with other sites:
http://mail.indiainfo.com
I have set the font for user defined -> Proportional to serif and serif to
MilleniumVarun. The above site then takes a beating. This site is supposed to be
in plain English.

Any workarounds?

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> Any workarounds?

Not easily, since the indiainfo site claims to be in the "user-defined" encoding
(a mistake on the site author's part, presumably).

Kedar, as I understand it the problem is that the font does not advertise itself
as supporting Unicode, so you have to explicitly tell Mozilla to use it for
pages that are claiming to be in the "user-defined" encoding.

The page at http://www.loksatta.com is doing exactly that.

The problem is, there are multiple scripts that use the "user-defined"
mechanism, not just Devanagari.  There is no way for Mozilla to know which font
you actually want associated with "user-defined" unless you tell it explicitly...

This is why the dynamic font stuff was created, to save all these hassles...
that's the only way that this site can work without changes to the site itself
to use a Unicode encoding.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 52746 ***

Comment 6

[Yuying Long]

Mark as verified per previous comment.