298068 - Large and ugly fonts with pages using non-western encoding and/or lang attribute

Status: NEW

(Core :: Internationalization, defect)

Description

[Vincent Lefevre]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux ppc; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050610 Firefox/1.0.4 (Debian package 1.0.4-3)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux ppc; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050610 Firefox/1.0.4 (Debian package 1.0.4-3)

The page at the above URL is displayed with very large fonts. See the snapshot
that will be attached...

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open the URL.
Actual Results:  
The page is displayed with very large fonts, and spaces between the letters.

Expected Results:  
The font size should be normal.

Comment 1

[Vincent Lefevre]

Attachment: Snapshot showing the bug

Comment 2

[Hermann Schwab]

check your font settings in Edit->Preferences->Appearance->Fonts
Fonts for: Japanese
and compare to those for Western fonts.

When I reduced the settings online, Mozilla got irresponsive for some seconds. 

Comment 3

[Vincent Lefevre]

The fonts are smaller but still look ugly. Firefox shouldn't do anything special
based on the encoding. Even if there were Japanese characters, the page could
have been in UTF-8 and would have probably looked differently!

Comment 4

[Jungshik Shin]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Firefox shouldn't do anything special based on the encoding. 

The character encoding is used as a fallback source of the language of a
document when it's not explicitly specified with 'lang=xx' or 'xml:lang=xx'.
And, firefox supports the language-based font selection.

Comment 5

[Vincent Lefevre]

OK, this makes sense. But couldn't Firefox guess the language type in another
way, for instance based on the character classes that really appears in the source?

Comment 6

[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.

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Comment 7

[Vincent Lefevre]

The problem is still present. Under Mac OS X, it looks much less ugly, but the
fonts are still bigger than normal.

Comment 8

[Vincent Lefevre]

There's the same problem with http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC22/WG14/www/docs/n1013.htm (document in English, but encoded with gb2312).

Comment 9

[Vincent Lefevre]

I could try with other firefox started on remote machines (using the same X server on my local machine), and I could see that with a Debian machine, I have the same problem, but with Fedora machines, the pages looked OK. So, this is probably a Debian-specific bug.

Comment 10

[Jungshik Shin]

(In reply to comment #9)
> I could try with other firefox started on remote machines (using the same X
> server on my local machine), and I could see that with a Debian machine, I have
> the same problem, but with Fedora machines, the pages looked OK. So, this is
> probably a Debian-specific bug.

well, with a *client*-side font technology like Xft, the old wisdom about X server doesn't hold any more :-). What's happening is that your debian installation has uglier Chinese/Japanese fonts than your Fedora installation. 

Anyway, one way to work around your problem is :

1. Set Chinese/Japanese fonts to your favorite 'Western' font in Edit | Preference 
2. In the url bar, type 'about:config'. In the text area at the top of the page, type 'name-list'
3. Set 'font.name-list.<style>.<lang>' to the list of fonts for <lang> that go well with your Western fonts selected in step 1.

With that setting, Latin letters in a page encoded in a Japanese/Chinese encoding will be rendered with the fonts selected in step 1 while Japanese/Chinese characters with the fonts listed in step 3

BTW, this only works on Windows and Linux (mozilla.org's build only. FC's pango-enabled build doesn't support font.name-list, yet. Neither does Mac OS X build)

Comment 11

[Vincent Lefevre]

(In reply to comment #10)
> well, with a *client*-side font technology like Xft, the old wisdom about X
> server doesn't hold any more :-). What's happening is that your debian
> installation has uglier Chinese/Japanese fonts than your Fedora installation. 

Yes, I have bitmap fonts for other applications, and Firefox picks these ones instead of the nice font that is selected when, for instance, the page is encoded in UTF-8 (this font contains Chinese/Japanese characters, so it would be OK).

> Anyway, one way to work around your problem is :
> 
> 1. Set Chinese/Japanese fonts to your favorite 'Western' font in Edit |
> Preference 
> 2. In the url bar, type 'about:config'. In the text area at the top of the
> page, type 'name-list'
> 3. Set 'font.name-list.<style>.<lang>' to the list of fonts for <lang> that go
> well with your Western fonts selected in step 1.

There are several problems with that:
* In the general case, without the nice global font I currently have, this would mean that I would no longer be able to display Chinese/Japanese; what Firefox needs to do is to select the font based on the actual characters, instead of the encoding or the language (since one can write Chinese/Japanese words, e.g. people names, with western characters, in a western context).
* One doesn't necessarily know the font used in western (in my case, this is "sans-serif" everywhere, but with Firefox, the actual font depends on the encoding or language).
* It is annoying to have to select the font for each language; Firefox should have a default font for any encoding or language (and possibly have a way to select a different font under some context, e.g. with a different language or if it knows that the default font can't render some characters).

Comment 12

[Jungshik Shin]

(In reply to comment #11)

> > 
> > 1. Set Chinese/Japanese fonts to your favorite 'Western' font in Edit |
> > Preference 
> > 2. In the url bar, type 'about:config'. In the text area at the top of the
> > page, type 'name-list'
> > 3. Set 'font.name-list.<style>.<lang>' to the list of fonts for <lang> that go
> > well with your Western fonts selected in step 1.
> 
> There are several problems with that:
> * In the general case, without the nice global font I currently have, this
> would mean that I would no longer be able to display Chinese/Japanese; 

You misunderstood what I wrote (ok. I wasn't very specific). 

For Japanese, set a nice 'Western' font (e.g. Bitstream Vera Sans for Sans-serif)  using the UI (Edit|Preference). Then, in 'about:config', list *Japanese* fonts that go well with the 'western' font for font.name-list.<style>.ja. 

Comment 13

[Vincent Lefevre]

When I type name-list in the about:config page, I get nothing.

Comment 15

[Vincent Lefevre]

This bug is still present with:

Build identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0.1 Iceweasel/9.0.1

I currently can see it on: http://source.tizen.org/source/

Comment 16

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The bug assignee didn't login in Bugzilla in the last 7 months, so the assignee is being reset.