46622 - Improve the lookup of fonts for MathML frames

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 947654

(Core :: MathML, defect)

Description

[rbs]

Adding this in bugzilla so that it doesn;t get forgotten.
====
     Subject: Re: Mathematica
        Date: 17 Dec 1999 06:29:56 GMT
        From:[e-mail] (Roger B. Sidje)
          To: Erik van der Poel <[e-mail]>
          CC:[e-mail], [e-mail]

Erik van der Poel wrote:
...
> Inside a MathML context (frame, or whatever) it is probably
> important to make sure that math fonts are tried first, before trying
> other non-math fonts. In HTML/CSS, the way to do this is to specify a
> font-family property (or HTML's FONT FACE, which is deprecated or
> frowned upon or something).
> 
>   font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;
> 
> For MathML, it might be a good idea to invent a new generic font type,
> similar to serif, sans-serif and so on. We could call it -moz-math,
> similar to the existing -moz-fixed.

When we were hacking GFX recently, we made provision for two generic names:
-moz-math-symbol (for math symbol fonts), and moz-math-text (for text fonts
that look nice when they accompany math symbols).

> I recently added some font prefs
> code for Windows. It picks up font prefs from the prefs file:
> 
>   user_pref("font.name.serif.x-western", "Times New Roman");
> 
> I suppose you could add a similar preference like this:
> 
> user_pref("font.list.-moz-math",
> "Math1,Math2,Math3,Math4,Math5,Symbol");
> 
> Then you could expand -moz-math to the list when enumerating nsFont's
> "name" member. (The place where we populate nsFontMetricsWin's mFonts
> member.)

This will be cool.
 
> Eventually, you could even add extensibility, so that people could add
> their own Unicode converter tables, and associate the tables with font
> names.

If time permits :-) Isn't this part of the bigger issue of web-fonts?
---
RBS

  Subject: Re: Mathematica
         Date: 17 Dec 1999 07:05:08 GMT
         From: [e-mail] (Erik van der Poel)
           To: "Roger B. Sidje" <[e-mail]>
           CC: [e-mail], [e-mail]

"Roger B. Sidje" wrote:
> 
> Erik van der Poel wrote:
> >
> > Eventually, you could even add extensibility, so that people could add
> > their own Unicode converter tables, and associate the tables with font
> > names.
> 
> If time permits :-) Isn't this part of the bigger issue of web-fonts?

MathML could be done with WebFonts (downloadable fonts), but I was
thinking of a person with a math font already on their computer, and
simply wanting to use it with Mozilla.

Erik

Comment 1

[rbs]

Implementation Notes:

Supporting generic -moz-math-symbol is a bit tricky to implement as GFX would 
need to know that the client is MathML-related.

Perhaps, a cleaner way to do this would be to teach the Style System to 
systematically append the generic -moz-math-symbol on all MathML style contexts 
belonging to MathML frames.

Or even simpler but debatable, could be to ask authors to always end their
MathML-related 'font-family: ...' lists with -moz-math-symbol/text :-)

Comment 2

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

Um, no, we're not doing that last one. :-)

Comment 3

[rbs]

A possible plan of action to fix this might be to leverage on the work done in
bug bug 116030 which allowed detecting of the language group of a character to
pick better fallback fonts. This onlt works on Windows at present.

1. Add a fictional language group: x-moz-math, and set prefs such as
user_pref("font.name-list.*.x-moz-math", "Math1,Math2,Math3,Math4,Math5,Symbol");

2. Extend the language group detector (bug 116030, bug 184848) so that it maps
math characters/symbols to x-moz-math.

Comment 4

[Michael Kohler [:mkohler]]

This is a mass change. Every comment has "assigned-to-new" in it.

I didn't look through the bugs, so I'm sorry if I change a bug which shouldn't be changed. But I guess these bugs are just bugs that were once assigned and people forgot to change the Status back when unassigning.

Comment 5

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt back Feb 10)]

This would provide a means for users to specify their preferred maths fonts while also providing reasonable fallback when documents specify fonts.

Comment 6

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

I'm marking this a duplicate of bug 947654, where we can decide how the math fonts will be selected.