288094 - Accented characters will not display in italics.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 180914

(Camino Graveyard :: Page Layout, defect)

Description

[adam rice]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041201 Camino/0.8.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041201 Camino/0.8.2

As shown on the referenced URL (indeed, any en.wikepedia.org page that uses
italicized, accented characters), Camino (and other Mac/Gecko browsers I have
tried) show non-italicized glyphs for accented characters. Same is true for
bolded characters. 

Note that in en.wikipedia.org, all accented characters are represented as
numeric Unicode entities, FWIW, because of the vexatious historical problem of
those pages being encoded as iso-8859-1). Wikipedia in other languages, such as
fr.wikipedia.org, is encoded in utf-8, and this problem does not appear on those
pages (one can click through to the French version of the above-referenced page
as a point of comparison). Also as a point of comparison, this problem does not
manifest in Safari.

This may be related to bug 244498

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load iso-8859-1 page containing numeric unicode entities in italics
2. Observe inappropriate glyph selection
3. Gouge out eyes in horror
Actual Results:  
Inappropriate glyph selection.

Expected Results:  
in-font glyph selection.

Comment 1

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Looks the same for me on both the English *and* French pages (latest Camino
nightly). I think this is a problem with certain fonts in OS X more than it's a
problem with Camino. Many OS X fonts don't contain all the Unicode glyphs in
both normal and italic (or bold) versions. That's very likely contributing to
the problem here.

cl

Comment 2

[L. H.]

Maybe bug 266848?

Comment 3

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

What Chris said.  The page is displaying as Geneva, which has no oblique/italic
version.  For some reason, fallback is working for the standard ASCII Roman
characters but not the non-ASCII Roman ones (ō, for example).

There's another problem (the real one): the page stylesheet, at least the one I
think it's using, doesn't declare an explict font, only 

font: x-small sans-serif;

so Gecko should choose the font selected in your Western font preferences for
sans-serif (for most of us it's Helvetica).

This is the second time I've seen Gecko/Gfx:Mac/whatever choose Geneva rather
than the appropriate, user-/pref-defined generic font.

Taking a second look at bug 266848, I think it's a very similar thing (or,
perhaps, the inverse): hitting that sans-serif declaration and putting the π in
Geneva rather than Lucida Grande.

Can I get some help (Chris, L.H.) looking for appropriate dupes and/or testcases
to get a good bug for Gfx:Mac / Internationalization / Layout:Fonts and Text,
wherever this should finally land?

Comment 4

[adam rice]

As Chris Lawson observes, I was hasty in saying the French pages are immune from
this problem. It seems as if some accented characters are treated as first-class
citizens in a given font, and others are treated as special cases. Looking more
carefully at these pages, I believe that even unitalicized, unbolded "special"
glyphs (like o-macron) are being rendered in a different font--I think Geneva is it.

Comment 5

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

I think this (and bug 244498) are ultimately yet another manifestation of
whatever core problem (bug 180914 comment 15 or, more generally, bug 121540)
either bug 219426, bug 148361, bug 180914, or bug 208037.

To avoid keeping around "yet another manifestation," I'm going to dupe this to
bug 180914 since jshin has made a reasonable guess at the causes.... 
Unfortunately, it seems Gecko will be stuck with this problem for a while.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 180914 ***