179946 - Symbolic fonts do not display properly, need generic solution (linux only)

Status: NEW

(Core :: Internationalization, defect)

Description

[Shanjian Li]

We have similar problem on windows as well, it will be fixed in bug 94319. 
Copied description from 94319:

Currently, when a symbolic font is utilized in a font face tag (ie. <font 
face="wingdings">), the text between the font tags will not be displayed using 
the symbolic font unless that particular font name has been appended to the 
fontencoding.properties file (indicating that the font should be treated as 
though it were utilizing a standard encoding (see Bug 77265)).

This solution is hardcoded and therefore not very adaptible.

If the user adds a new font symbolic font to their system, they will very 
likely expect to be able to utilize it in the browser or email.  Tediously 
adding each new font to this hardcoded list is unwieldy and inelegant.

Is there a way to specify a more generic situation?  Perhaps a flag for 
embedders to indicate that, when a symbolic font is encountered, they would 
just like to default to treating the font as though it utilizes windows-1252 
encoding?


The following is the list of fonts that were not properly displayed during a 
recent test:
Map Symbols 
Marlett 
Monotype Sorts 
MS Outlook 
MT Extra 
Symbol
Wingdings 2
Wingdings 3

The solution is to use win-1252 as default encoding for symbol fonts. But we
only do this for font specified using font tag.  See bug 94319 for detail and
testcase.

Comment 1

[Jungshik Shin]

With my patch for bug 176290, it's relatively easy to fix this bug for Mozilla-Xft
(Mozilla with Xft turned on). As for Mozilla-X11core and Mozilla-FT(freetype),
I'm afraid hard-coding is unavoidable at the momemnt.
(nsFontMetrics(GTK|Xlib|Qt|FreeType).cpp
have a hard-coded list of 'symbol' fonts. They don't use fontEncoding.properties
file)
This doesn't mean that a generic solution cannot be found for those two cases,
of course.
I'll try to find one. 

A question to shanjian. My understanding is that
'familyNameQuirks' field of nsFont can be different for a single font depending
on whether it's specified  in html 'fontface' or via CSS. Am I right? 

Can I take this one, Simon? 

Comment 2

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

With pleasure :-)

Comment 3

[Shanjian Li]

>> 'familyNameQuirks' field of nsFont can be different for a single font >>
depending
>> on whether it's specified  in html 'fontface' or via CSS. Am I right? 
Yes, absolutely right.  

Comment 4

[Jungshik Shin]

For Mozilla-Xft, this depends on bug 176290. 

Comment 5

[rbs]

*** Bug 249769 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

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

The bug assignee didn't login in Bugzilla in the last 7 months, so the assignee is being reset.