461529 - Cyrillic monospace text renders in proportional font

Status: NEW

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

Description

[Tony Goold]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10_4_11; en) AppleWebKit/525.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Safari/525.22
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092414 Firefox/3.0.3

Cyrillic text does not appear to be correctly identified for the purposes of picking which font to use to render it. This is particularly noticeable on the Mac, because the default monospace font for Western (Courier) does not have Cyrillic glyphs, so any Cyrillic text with its font-family set to monospace ends up rendering in a proportional font. This can be reproduced on Windows by changing the default monospace font for Western from Courier New to Courier.

Note that changing the font preference for Cyrillic monospace has no effect whatsoever.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. (Windows only) Set the default Western monospace font to Courier.
2. Visit a page that wants to show Cyrillic text in a monospace font.
3. Change the Western monospace font to something with Cyrillic glyphs (Courier New on Windows, Monaco on Mac OS X).
4. Change it back.
Actual Results:  
Cyrillic text is displayed in a horribly tasteful, proportional font, insulting us with its beauty, design, and bewildering variety of widths.

Expected Results:  
Cyrillic text is displayed in all the glory a Soviet era typewriter can produce. All characters are identical in width.

Comment 1

[Tony Goold]

Attachment: Test case illustrating the problem

Comment 2

[Joe Drew (not getting mail)]

This continues to be the case on OS X, though apparently it looks good on Windows and Linux.

Comment 3

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

We fixed something similar to this in bug 681895, but apparently this case is a bit different and still doesn't make a good choice of font.

Comment 4

[Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten)]

I suspect this is a better place for this bug.