418035 - Firefox menu with language set to Telugu (indic) results in small telugu font half the size of corresponding english font making it unreadable

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

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

Description

[arjuna rao chavala]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; te-IN; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080208 Remi/2.0.0.12-1.fc6.remi Firefox/2.0.0.12
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; te-IN; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12

Firefox menu with language set to Telugu (indic) results in small telugu font half the size of corresponding english font making it unreadable. This requires that the windows theme appearance be chanmged to extra large fonts and/or menu size message box font size manually increased to 16 pt or above for readability. Indic fonts need bigger font sizes for readability. This is handled very well on linux.
sample screenshots are available at http://wiki.mozilla.org/%E0%B0%AB%E0%B1%88%E0%B0%B0%E0%B1%8D%E2%80%8D%E0%B0%AB%E0%B0%BE%E0%B0%95%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%B8%E0%B1%8D_%E0%B0%A4%E0%B1%86%E0%B0%A8%E0%B1%81%E0%B0%97%E0%B0%BF%E0%B0%82%E0%B0%AA%E0%B1%81


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load telugu LPI from incubator (details in the URL mentioned in bug description) and set language to te-IN
2. Restart firefox
3. Observe menus
Actual Results:  
screenshots at the URL referred in description

Expected Results:  
Menu/message box for telugu characters increased to min 16 and corresponding sized english font is to be selected, as menu contain english and non english charcters,

Critical for firefox adoption by Telugu users on windows platform.

Comment 1

[arjuna rao chavala]

Problem screen shot (also at the site referred in description)
http://wiki.mozilla.org/images/c/cc/Firefox_winxp_default.png

Comment 2

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

This does not block bug 411100.

Comment 3

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Ankit, you could reproduce this?

It'd be good to see if this is different between the UI and a web page, as those use different font settings.

CCing smontagu, too.

Comment 4

[arjuna rao chavala]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Ankit, you could reproduce this?
> 
> It'd be good to see if this is different between the UI and a web page, as
> those use different font settings.
> 
> CCing smontagu, too.
> 

As you can see from the attachment, only UI is affected. web pages like telugu wikipedia are rendered fine.

Comment 5

[Ankit Patel]

Attachment: Telugu screenshot with the increased font size from the Desktop Appearance section of Properties.

Hi Pike/Arjuna,

When I have initially installed Telugu on my Windows Machine, I got the same image like Arjuna received, which is http://wiki.mozilla.org/images/c/cc/Firefox_winxp_default.png

But, I tried to change (increase) the size of the fonts from the Desktop (right+click) => Properties => Appearance section => Extra Large (font size) selection, and I got the attached screenshot, in which you can notice that the size of both the English, as well as Telugu glyphs looks same.

So, I am not sure what kind of issue is this...

Comment 6

[Ankit Patel]

Attachment: Gujarati screenshot with normal size font.

Btw, In gujarati, the font sizes looks fine. I have taken this screenshot from the normal font sized Firefox browser. So, there might be some issue with Telugu default font used in Windows XP.

Comment 7

[Ankit Patel]

Adding Krishnababu in the CC list of the bug, who is a Telugu speaker and also works for Telugu Localization of Firefox and various other projects, for the opinion on this...

Comment 8

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Actually, the rendering of this font on XP is just crap alltogether, it seems.

Looking at the wiki page in the initial comment as well as the screenshot, there seem to be tons of composition artifacts, and Ankit agrees with that. Fx3 is only superior to Fx2 in that it picks a bold font for headings on the wiki page.

Telugu doesn't render at all on my mac, both on fx2 and 3.

Do we have any platform without bad rendering? I can't test on linux myself.

Comment 9

[Ankit Patel]

Attachment: Corrected Telugu screenshot, after enabling Complex Script support...

In the latest screenshot I have taken, It doesn't look like the English characters are larger in size than Telugu characters...

Arjuna, Can you please have a look at this screenshot and let's know, whether the problem still exists or not...

Comment 10

[Ankit Patel]

Attachment: Corrected Gujarati screenshot, after enabling Complex Script support...

Thanks to Sunilmohan, for pointing out the problem immediately...

Comment 11

[Sunil Mohan Adapa]

(In reply to comment #9)
> Created an attachment (id=320908) [details]
> Corrected Telugu screenshot, after enabling Complex Script support...

Everything looks fine to me in this screenshot.

Comment 12

[Sunil Mohan Adapa]

I could not reproduce the problem with Firefox 2.0.0.14 and the te langpack from incubator on Windows XP SP2. UI font is of the same size as page font.

Comment 13

[arjuna rao chavala]

Thanks all for your testing and feedback. We further need to investigate, whether this is dependent on  the graphics card/driver on the PC.
Regarding Axel's comment #8, telugu font rendering is fine on windows xp and Linux, except one or two minor problems in linux, which seem to have been fixed as per the final screen shot on the wiki page referred in comment#1.
We need some more testing on Mac.

Comment 14

[Sunil Mohan Adapa]

(In reply to comment #13)
> Thanks all for your testing and feedback. We further need to investigate,
> whether this is dependent on  the graphics card/driver on the PC.

How is Telugu text rendering on the rest of the system, in notepad for example?

Comment 15

[arjuna rao chavala]

Tested 3.0.2 pre te language pack. The menu sizes are no longer a problem, (for a screen shot on windows xp see http://wiki.mozilla.org/Windows#firefox_3.0.2_pre) though some complex character seems to have changed for worse on windows.