279689 - No way to get firefox to display cyrillic characters

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[kynn jones]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041111 Firefox/1.0 (Debian package 1.0-2)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041111 Firefox/1.0 (Debian package 1.0-2)

No documentation exists instructing the user on how to get firefox to display
non-latin characters.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Bring up firefox.
2. Set View->Character Encoding to anything you like
3. Visit www.google.ru
Actual Results:  
Page shows little boxes in place of cyrillic characters.

Expected Results:  
The software should have documentation explaining how to get the desired behavior.

Comment 1

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/TT-Debian.html might be what you are looking for.

Comment 2

[Ben Fowler]

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050124
Firefox/1.0+

http://www.google.ru/ and  (for example)
http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/lang/ru/TidBITS-ru-566.html , display the
Cyrillic Characters perfectly for me.

Do you have a font with glyphs at the relevant code points? This sounds
like a cart and horse problem. I would expect someone reporting a problem 
with Gecko and Internationalisation to have a working (Cyrillic in your case)
system, but to have found Firefox not to have taken advantage of it
in rendering Unicode encoded pages.

You might want to look here
http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=4599&message=4&state=reply ,
but there are not many resources for non-latin pages; and if you are still 
having difficulty please post a follow-up stating where you have got stuck.

Comment 3

[Mig21]

this is not a made up bug. firefox never displayed cyrillic characters on
slackware (i don't use anything else) while mozilla always does. this is also a
problem with thunderbird.

there's no way in hell i'm moving from mozilla until firefox starts to show my
favourite pages.

Comment 4

[Ben Fowler]

mig21: (In reply to comment #3)
> ... Ihere's no way in hell i'm moving from mozilla until firefox starts to 
> show my favourite pages.

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050702
Firefox/1.0+

WFM.

It is not being suggested that the problem is imaginary. I agree that it would 
be curious for Mozilla to work, but not Firefox.

You may need to give details of the versions concerned and your platform, and
since this Bug is at least partly about documentation, the doc you have studied
without getting any insight into your problem

Comment 5

[shattered]

Sounds like core fonts (mozilla) vs. scalable fonts (firefox, thunderbird) issue.  XFree86 ships Cyrillic core fonts, but submitter may not have had Cyrillic scalable fonts on his system.

Comment 6

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

Resolving as INVALID. Comment 5 sums it up.