404659 - Font selection by ISO 15924 script codes instead of languages

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 192636

(Core :: Internationalization, enhancement)

Description

[z0idberg]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de-DE; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071104 Firefox/2.0.0.9
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de-DE; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071104 Firefox/2.0.0.9

Right now, the selection of a font for a specific script is done via the language itself (e.g. “Japanese” or “Chinese (Traditional)”). This is a bit unflexible, because sometimes the designer needs to write a language in a different script, but does not want the font specified for that language to be chosen.

For example:

Japanese in Latin transcription. The designer chooses a Japanese font for Japanese, but the latin glyphs are not as good as in the ordinary Latin font.
If the user writes <span xml:lang="ja">Nihon</span>, the word will be displayed in an ugly way.

A better solution would be to implement a flexible solution based on ISO 15924 (http://www.unicode.org/iso15924/).

This way, the web designer could write:

<span xml:lang="ja-Hani">日本</span>
and
<span xml:lang="ja-Latn">Nihon</span>

and the user could specify that “ja-Hani” would be displayed with a Japanese font, “Latn” with a Latin font, but e.g. “de-Latn” with another font and “zh-Hani” with another font than “ja-Hani”.

This would also be necessary to write Fraktur on websites. Fraktur has the script code “Latf”, but no language code. German Fraktur text would be defined by “de-Latf”. There is no way to get the Fraktur text displayed correctly.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Just for the record, it would be better practice to write
<span xml:lang="ja-Jpan">日本</span>
"Jpan" is a recent addition to ISO-15924, defined as "alias for Han + Hiragana + Katakana"