536130 - Add Unicode Private Use Area Font Option

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

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

Description

[meliste]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.6) Gecko/20091201 Firefox/3.5.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.6) Gecko/20091201 Firefox/3.5.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Due to the behavior documented in bugs #399369, #489014, #534888, and possibly others, characters in the Private Use Area are inaccessible unless the user works around the limitation by setting their fonts for all scripts on the page to fonts that include PUA characters.  In effect, this makes the PUA unusable because of the obscure workaround and some fonts for PUA characters lacking Western etc. scripts.

The PUA would be easier to use while just as free of mojibake problems if Firefox presented the option to specify a font for the private use area specifically, as if it were a script.  The user could then specify a font containing the characters needed, and change that font if the user needs to view a page using PUA characters differently.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to a page using PUA characters without changing the font for any other scripts on the page to one that includes those PUA characters, no matter what your other settings are.
Actual Results:  
PUA characters displayed as placeholders.

Expected Results:  
PUA characters falling back to user-specified PUA font.

Comment 1

[:Ms2ger (he/him; ⌚ UTC+1/+2)]

This shout be wontfix, IMO. We should not encouraging using PUA.

Comment 2

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Comment 1 is a bit of an overstatement IMO: there's nothing wrong with using the PUA by private agreement, with specified fonts, and we support that.

Comment 3

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

ISTM that if a page uses PUA characters, it should explicitly style them using the appropriate font, otherwise the page author has no control whatsoever over the characters the reader will see.

If the page specifies a suitable font, and if the user has that font installed (or, better, if the page specifies a particular font and provides it via @font-face, to ensure it is available to the browser), then the PUA characters should display fine; no twiddling with font settings is needed.