252386 - Font preferences for Unicode having no effect

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 91190

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

Description

[Seungbeom Kim]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616

I'm using a Korean version of Windows XP, and Mozilla doesn't seem to use the
font preferences for Unicode at all. Even a UTF-8 web page that has no Korean
characters at all is rendered exactly as if it were a Korean (EUC-KR) page. I
have verified that changing the font preferences for Korean affects UTF-8 web pages.

By the way, I'm confused about what the font preferences for Unicode are
supposed to mean; a Unicode page can be of many languages. This might be a
separate issue, but wouldn't it better if texts in a Unicode page respected the
font preferences for each language? Unicode and other *languages* (Western,
Japanese, Korean, etc) are not mutually exclusive; Unicode (or UTF-x) and other
*encodings* (ISO-8859-1, SHIFT_JIS, EUC-KR, etc) are. Even so, I wouldn't expect
the same Korean contents to look different just because one was encoded in
EUC-KR and the other in UTF-8.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/postscript-utf-8.txt (on a
Korean version of Windows).
2. Go to Edit > Preferences > Appearance > Fonts, choose Fonts for: Korean, and
change any of the fonts.
Actual Results:  
1. The text is displayed in the fonts specified for Korean, not for Unicode.
2. The text follows the fonts for Korean, not for Unicode.

Expected Results:  
1. The text should be displayed in the fonts specified for Unicode.
2. The text should follow the fonts for Unicode.

Comment 1

[Jungshik Shin]

Yes, it's confusing. Eventually, we have to get rid of 'unicode' entry from the
font pref. panel. As long as fonts specified for Korean cover characters in
UTF-8-encoded pages, 'Unicode' fonts are NOT summoned up for the service. 
In some ports of Gfx, they're never utilized (see bug 232716)

> Actual Results:  
> 1. The text is displayed in the fonts specified for Korean, not for Unicode.
> 2. The text follows the fonts for Korean, not for Unicode.

This is by design and it works rather well on Windows, but not so well on other
ports of Gfx. 

 
> if texts in a Unicode page respected the font preferences for each language? 

  It does especially if you specify 'lang'. See also bu 208479

Comment 2

[Seungbeom Kim]

While your comment seems to make some sense, I think it's still better to let
users specify which font to use for Unicode documents that don't have 'lang'
attributes, at least than to always fall back on the Korean fonts.

In my case, I see lots of documents in Western languages which would look much
better and much more readable in Western fonts but appears in (bad) Korean fonts
just because they're encoded in UTF-8. Unfortunately many of them don't have
'lang' attributes. I can specify the Western encoding manually to change the
look, but then I have to repeat it every time I follow a link.

I'm not quite sure how this should be resolved ideally, but since we already
have a Unicode entry in the font preferences, we can make use of it: just let
its default value be the same as that for the current locale, let those users
who want to override it do it, and everyone will be happy. :)

Or there could be a separate mapping for Unicode documents without 'lang'
attributes specifying which language group to fall back on, which would make
changing it easier than having to change all of the typefaces and sizes.

Comment 3

[Jungshik Shin]

(In reply to comment #2)

> In my case, I see lots of documents in Western languages which would look much
> better and much more readable in Western fonts but appears in (bad) Korean fonts
> just because they're encoded in UTF-8. Unfortunately many of them don't have

We already have a solution for that problem at least on Windows (and soon on
Gfx:Xft as well) . See bug 229394 and bug 227815.

> have a Unicode entry in the font preferences, we can make use of it

I agree (see bug 256383 where I made a change to make a better use of it).
My position has changed :-).  This is an dupe of bug 91190 which I should have
fixed  a long time ago. 

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 91190 ***