1747743 - It's non-obvious to users that `lang="fa"` falls under the "Arabic" category in Firefox preferences advanced font settings section

Status: UNCONFIRMED

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

Description

[Vincent Lefevre]

Attachment: testcase

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:95.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/95.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Change the default font size from 16 to 13.
2. Open the attached HTML file.

Actual results:

Both "text (en)" and "text (fa-Latn)" use the default font size 13, but "text (fa)" uses the original font size 16 (what is in parentheses corresponds to the lang value). This can be seen on the rendered text and also with "Inspect (Q)" from the contextual menu.

Expected results:

Both "text (fa-Latn)" and "text (fa)" should appear with the same font size since this is the same language (FYI, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_6.5 uses "fa-Latn" for "Metri Shesh-o Nim" and https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Loi_de_Téhéran uses "fa" — that's how I found the issue).

Changing the font size for "Other Writing Systems" (as Persian/Farsi doesn't appear in the list, and about:config doesn't seem to have anything either) doesn't have any effect, so that it seems that the font size for "fa" is hard-coded.

BTW, if the text uses Latin characters, I'm wondering why the Latin settings are not used, whatever the lang value.

Comment 1

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

I'd expect the content with lang="fa" to use the font-size preference for Arabic (from the Advanced font settings dialog), as Persian (Farsi) is written with (an extended form of) the Arabic script.

So if you change the default font size for Arabic to 13, does that make it match the Latin-script size?

Comment 2

[Vincent Lefevre]

Yes, changing the font size for Arabic has an effect on lang="fa" text. Perhaps the menu of the font settings should say "Arabic / Persian" or "Arabic / Farsi" (as this is far from being obvious, in particular with romanized Persian text).

Comment 3

[Vincent Lefevre]

Or there could be another way to change the font settings: by selecting text + an item in the contextual menu.

Comment 4

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:alaskanemily, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 5

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Per comment 1 - 2, it sounds like things are approximately working-as-intended here, except that the labeling is perhaps confusing from a user's perspective since it's non-obvious to users that Farsi is under the category of Arabic, per this suggestion from the reporter:

Perhaps the menu of the font settings should say "Arabic / Persian" or "Arabic / Farsi" (as this is far from being obvious, in particular with romanized Persian text).

(Side note: I'm admittedly unfamiliar with the language-specific details here, but I'll just note that one could make a similar argument that English-speaking users might similarly be confused by seeing "Latin" in this menu; I'm not sure regular users would colloquially think of English script as being in the "Latin" category, even though that's the technical term for the writing system that English uses.)

I suspect the terms in this picker are optimized for being concise, abstract, and technical font-designer terms-of-art, not necessarily optimized for being user-readable. (That's perhaps not-great from a user's perspective, but this is at least buried in an "Advanced" pane which is probably why it's somewhat technical.)

In any case, it looks like the string in question is here:
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/049f3e8d328c4b6bac9bf4b27309541a2e913686/browser/locales/en-US/browser/preferences/fonts.ftl#17

If we were to make a change here, it would be to that^ line I suppose.