290822 - Firefox doesn't display correct CSS-specified fonts, Latvian characters substituted

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

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

Description

[Guntis]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050327 Firefox/1.0+ (PowerBook)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050327 Firefox/1.0+ (PowerBook)

If you open this page in Safari (http://www.adventisti.lv/lv/intro_lv.php), it
shows all Latvian fonts correctly. As does Firefox Windows version. But Mac
version of Firefox is substituting Latvian characters with those characters from
another font, presumably Lucida Grande. And, while the font should be Verdana or
Tahoma or Arial or Helvetica, Firefox shows Times or Times New Roman! Here is
CSS info, which is completely ignored:

FONT.small {FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
FONT-SIZE: 11px; FONT-WEIGHT: normal; COLOR: #000000; TEXT-DECORATION: none}

Then in page links are marked as <font class='small'> - but Firefox ignores it.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open the browser and see left side column links.
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
Links are shown with Times or Times New Roman font, Latvian characters
substituted with another font. Looks ugly.

Expected Results:  
Links should be displayed with Verdana or Arial or Helvetica font.

Any text in Latvian can't be displayed correctly... And the output looks ugly
because of the font substitution.

Comment 1

[Guntis]

Just downloaded official Firefox 1.0.3 today. It seems that CSS info is used, but Latvian characters still 
look ugly. All diacretic marks are lower than they should and shifted to the right. It looks like there is 
still some kind of font substitution...

Comment 2

[Gabriel Sjoberg]

Marking down priority and adding fonts keyword.  Can someone who reads Latvian
please verify this bug?

Comment 3

[Mark Weixel]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Marking down priority and adding fonts keyword.  Can someone who reads Latvian
> please verify this bug?

I can't read Latvian, but you really don't need to to verify the bug.  If you look at the page in question side by side in Safari and Firefox, you can tell that certain accented characters are being presented in a font other than the unaccented characters.  For some reason, CSS style is being over-ridden at the character level, seemingly defaulting to another font if the characters fall in another code range.

The same phenomenon can be seen at http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~djb/scrollWidth_test.html .  This page contains a basic javascript test for the existence of a series of fonts with Medieval Cyrillic characters.  In Safari, if a particular font is installed, text strings in cyrillc and latin are presented; in Mac Firefox, the cyrillc is presented in a default sans-serif Unicode font (Lucida Grande?), while the latin text is presented in the chosen font.  It is almost as if Firefox refuses to use particular fonts if characters are outside the basic Latin-1 character set.

It has been suggested elsewhere that this is due to the fact that Mac Firefox uses an old font enumeration routine.  Presumably, Safari uses the new system and therefore gets the right font information for all characters.

I can provide screenshots from Safari and Firefox illustrating the original poster's point, as well as the one that I have detailed here if that would be helpful.

-- Mark