425367 - Support for stretchy fences built from glyphs in SymbolMT

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: MathML, defect, P2)

Description

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

Attachment: Current Windows XP rendering with default fonts

MS Windows XP has little Unicode font support for stretchy fences (brackets).
The Monotype Symbol font has some useful glyphs for building these characters
and with bug 399636 now fixed we can easily access these glyphs from the PUA
without the font getting in the way of Unicode characters.

The lack of SymbolMT support is a regression.  Mozilla 1.8 handled this
font through font-specific encoding conversions.

Mac has a Unicode Symbol font and so doesn't need any special support.

We shouldn't make any assumptions about the encoding of a font with family
name Symbol on Unix because there exist Adobe, Monotype, and Apple fonts all
with family name Symbol, but each of them uses different encodings.

Linux doesn't need to use any Symbol font because most Linux systems have
DejaVu Sans and Standard Symbols L, which provide (at least) the same
functionality.

Comment 1

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

Attachment: Current Windows XP rendering with Cambria Math

Even with Cambria Math installed (from PowerPoint Viewer 2007 or similar),
because we don't yet handle its new MATH OpenType table, we don't get access
to medium sized glyphs and so parentheses and curly brackets are either short
or tall.  (And the parts of left square bracket don't align nicely.)

Comment 2

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

Attachment: Windows XP rendering possible with Symbol

Comment 3

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

(Cambria Math was not installed.)

Comment 4

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

Attachment: mathfontSymbolMT.properties for layout/mathml/base/src/

This needs to be installed in res/fonts under the name mathfontSymbol.properties,
font.mathfont-glyph-tables in mathfont.properties needs to be modified to include "Symbol" and the font.mathfont-family preference needs to be modified to include "Symbol".

Comment 5

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

> because we don't yet handle its new MATH OpenType table

Bug 407059.

Comment 6

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

Attachment: Add mathfontSymbol.properties for MS Windows

It might have been nice to have a special file name for the Monotype font but the MathML code expects it to be installed with a filename based on the family name and nsinstall doesn't support renaming files.  No other platforms need a mathfontSymbol.properties file now so I'll just use this for SymbolMT to keep things simple.

I can't find PACKAGE_FILE used anywhere so I'm not sure what macros are defined when it is processed, or whether it matters.  Other PACKAGE_FILES appear to be using what look like makefile variables rather than ACDEFINES so I've just followed along there.

This also repositions Cambria Math in the list of default preferred fonts as it isn't rendering as well as I had expected (comment 1).

Comment 7

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

Comment on attachment 312791 [details] [diff] [review]
Add mathfontSymbol.properties for MS Windows

We should get this in because without it there would be many cases where the regression is noticeable on Windows XP (without extra fonts).

The patch only affects data files and build (no run-time code except prefs) so the possible effects of any risk are small.

Comment 8

[Damon Sicore (:damons)]

+'ing w/ P2 as it's a regression.  

Comment 9

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

Comment on attachment 312791 [details] [diff] [review]
Add mathfontSymbol.properties for MS Windows

I checked this in but it caused all kinds of problems because the destination of the shell output redirection for mathfont.properties already existed as a was a symlink to the source file, so the source file got truncated.

Comment 10

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

Attachment: Add mathfontSymbol.properties for MS Windows (and ensure that mathfont.properties is a new file)

The simple solution is to rm -f the filename before writing to the file.

Comment 11

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

http://bonsai.mozilla.org/cvsquery.cgi?module=PhoenixTinderbox&branch=HEAD&cvsroot=%2Fcvsroot&date=explicit&mindate=1207366621&maxdate=1207366786&who=karlt%2B%25karlt.net