356049 - Firefox 2.0 won't render Unicode Indic Fonts correctly

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Internationalization, defect)

Description

[anu]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061003 Firefox/2.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061003 Firefox/2.0

Firefox 2.0 does not render unicode indic fonts correctly

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Fire up firefox
2.Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Enabling_complex_text_support_for_Indic_scripts#Check_for_existing_support

3.Witness bad rendering..! 


Actual Results:  
Expects Firefox to render Unicode Indic Text correctly

Expected Results:  
Mangled Rendering 

Historic Problem. 

This is a major hurdle in promoting Firefox @ Linux amongst Indic Font users. You're loosing follower base here. Please fix..

Comment 1

[anu]

Screenshots of the problem. 

(1) Example of troubled rendering in FF2.0: http://evuraan.googlepages.com/firefox2rendering.png

(2) Much  rendering ,from Konqueror: 
http://evuraan.googlepages.com/anjali_konqueror.png

Comment 2

[J. Paul Reed [:preed]]

-> General for triage.

Comment 3

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Note the instructions later in that page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Enabling_complex_text_support_for_Indic_scripts#Viewing_Indic_Text_5

Comment 4

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

I assume that's the reason the reporter filed in Build Config: if that's actually correct, then having it work out of the box either requires --enable-ctl and --disable-pango, or maybe if the Ubuntu part's correct, --disable-ctl and --enable-pango.

Comment 5

[Jungshik Shin]

(In reply to comment #4)
> I assume that's the reason the reporter filed in Build Config: if that's
> actually correct, then having it work out of the box either requires
> --enable-ctl and --disable-pango, or maybe if the Ubuntu part's correct,
> --disable-ctl and --enable-pango.

It's the latter. 'enable-ctl' has nothing to do with gtk2 build. It only affects Xlib build. ('--disable-ctl' is the default so that there's no need to disable explicitly)

BTW, MathML and performance have been two obstacles in enabling pango for 1.8 branch as far as I know.

Comment 6

[morbini]

Hi, my friend was trying to read the BBC tamil news website and noticed some swapped characters. We tried to open the same page with IE and it displayed it correctly. The test was on Windows XP with Firefox 2.0 and IE 6.
I saw various bug reports related to this problem, most unconfirmed or abandoned (no activity for long time). I'm not sure if this problem is solved with some third party patch or if it will be fixed in the next release of Firefox.
Any info will be appreciated.

Comment 7

[Naresh V]

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=166549

Can't we have pango enabled by default in the latest binaries you're providing for linux? Most DEs do that, it's just the browser that's missing out.
In any case, how much of a performance hit is it anyway? 
Percentage increase in CPU or MEM of firefox as such would be very small, right?

Comment 8

[John Vandenberg]

I can reproduce this problem with Firefox 2 on Windows XP after installing the fonts mentioned in comment 3.  Internet Explorer also has problems, showing a square box for many glyphs that it doesnt attempt to render where Firefox does render them.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3

Comment 9

[Shankar Unni]

The real problem is with the composition of vowels with consonants. E.g. in a composition of a consonant with a short vowel sound, the vowel modifier is supposed to be displayed to the *left* of the consonant, not to its right (even though the character codes are in the order of the consonant followed by the vowel modifier).

Specifically, see the "Checking for existing support" URL in the original description above.  Look carefully at the first entry (the Bengali entry). Look at the rendering of the vowel modifier (shown with a broken circle in the middle column, to indicate which side of the consonant it should be displayed on).  Notice that the FF display gets this wrong.  (IE gets it right, as do most other Windows programs that depend on Windows display of Indic text).

Comment 10

[Shankar Unni]

Personally, from a point of view of proper Indic font display, I feel this is a CRITICAL bug, as it basically makes FF useless for reading Indic-language sites.

Iamigen a brwoesr thta idslyas txet lkie tihs..

Comment 11

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

This is fixed on trunk and won't be fixed in 2.0. Except for justified text, it works on Linux with a pango-enabled build as mentioned in previous comments, and on Windows XP if one goes to Control Panel | Regional and Language Options | Languages and turns on the option "Install files for complex script and right to left languages.."