260748 - wrong encoding when using font specified by documents

Status: UNCONFIRMED

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

Description

[Simon Anders]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803

With very many websites, I encounter incorrect rendering of common punctuation
marks, espially quotes. An example is Eckel's book on C++ which can be
downloaded in HTML from the URL given above.

In this HTML file, which seems to have been generated with MS Word 10,
apostophes are rendered as 'y' with diareses and closing single quotes as broken
vertical bar.

If I switch off the option "Allow documents to use other fonts", all glyphs are
displayed correctly.

Sorry for maybe showing a bit of lack of knowledge, but what is happening here?
If the document requests, say, Verdana, and I have manually selected Western
character encoding in ISO-8859-1 (or -15, or whateer is right), and my system
cannot provide Verdana in the right encoding, shouldn't Mozilla then override
the font request and use a font that can display the glyphs correctly, even if
this means that the appearance might be wrong?

Or am I mistaken here, and this should not be considered a problem of Mozilla,
but blamed on the distribution (I am using RedHat 9) or even on the HTML file?

However, the problem occurs on so many web sites that a work-around would be
_very_ useful. Maybe, one could allow the user to specify a font substitution table.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
A typical set of settings would be:
In the Appearance|Fonts dialog: Proportional font set to Sans-Serif, 16 pt, and
Sans-Serif to adobe-helvetica-iso8859-15 for "Western" encoding.
The above URL allows to download a typical file that is displayed incorrectly on
my RedHat Linux box.

Actual Results:  
Quotation marks, apostrophes and the like rendered incorrectly.

Expected Results:  
Allow document to choose other fonts", the glyphs are correct. However,
everything is displayed proportional, even the code examples. (I know, this is
probably partly due to MS Word's stupidity in specifying Windows-only fonts.)
But a good deal of the Web looks this way.

Comment 1

[Colin S]

Confirmed that I am not experiencing this bug on Windows, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows;
U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910. Text renders correctly, even
with "Allow documents to use other fonts" enabled. This is with "Thinking in C++
Volume 2" from the referenced Web site.

Comment 2

[Simon Anders]

Just stumbled across another page with the same error, i.e. closing single
quotes are wrongly displayed as a broken vertical bar (or is this an "i" with a
vertical accent?):

  http://www.sizes.com/food/chocolate.htm

Note in this example, that the page does _not_ request a specific font, but even
clearly specifies (in a meta tag): charset=ISO-8859-1

Also, note the line "<td>&ldquo;sweet&rdquo;</td>" in the HTML source, coding
for the wrongly displayed closing quote: The quote is not given as character but
as HTML entity. And still it is displayed wrongly. That's odd. 

Or is my font broken?

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> Or is my font broken?

That's exactly what it's sounding like....

jshin, wasn't there some deal with some fonts using an out-of-date mapping table
for codepoints to glyphs?

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
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you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
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If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
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Thank you for your help in this matter.

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Comment 5

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9pre) Gecko/2008060101 SeaMonkey/2.0a1pre

WFM on both the URL at top of this bug and the one in comment #2. I "allow" documents to set their own fonts but I happen to have a lot of fonts installed. (I'm running openSUSE 10.3 and I have installed additional free fonts from various places on the Web.)