581674 - Firefox crashes or hangs when Osaka font is installed on Windows

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[u217243]

I have seen some blog posts and tweets that Firefox crashes when users visit web sites using Japanese Osaka font and the font is installed on user system. We need to figure it out.

Comment 1

[John Daggett (:jtd)]

Yoshino-san, can you post an exact set of steps to reproduce the problem.  Specifically, which version of Osaka (i.e. source OSX version), the steps used to extract the font (Osaka is packaged as a .dfont so it's not a simple drag-n-drop to a Windows box), the version of Windows along with a testcase that crashes.

Without considering that moving a copy of Osaka from Mac to Windows is a license violation, what's the underlying reason for doing this, especially given that Meiryo is already available on Windows 7?  Nostalgia?

I don't think we should be blocking on something like this, certainly if there's not a clear testcase that would indicate that this is something commonly affecting users.

Comment 2

[Joe Drew (not getting mail)]

John, I'm only going to block on the _investigation_ of this - if it's actually a problem it should probably block, but if it's not, well, then, that's fine.

Comment 3

[Kohei Yoshino [:kohei]]

I'll try to reproduce the bug.

As John said, the Windows porting maybe illegal stuff and corrupted anyway, I think...

Comment 4

[Joe Drew (not getting mail)]

Deafening silence!

Given that this seems to be a pretty weird thing to do, I'm going to unblock on this. Feel free to renom if more information comes up.

Comment 5

[timeless]

The web makes it terribly easy to install a font named Osaka:
http://cooltext.com/Download-Font-大阪+Osaka
http://www.dailyfreefonts.com/fonts/info/1240-Osaka.html
http://www.sostars.com/osaka-sans-serif-font/
http://osaka.is.land.to/
http://www.urbanfonts.com/fonts/Osaka.htm
http://fukuoka.cool.ne.jp/dream_theater/other/osakafont.html

Please note that most of these sites claim it's free. Expecting a normal user to know it isn't allowed is unreasonable.

http://homepage.mac.com/nojiri/macosx/feedback30en.html#fontbookOsaka is odd.

It looks like
http://www.geocities.jp/osakaforwin/
is a source for "an" osaka font according to:
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/kasahi/20070704/1183564815

again, i have no way of knowing if this Osaka is the same as the one I have on my Mac.

Please note that licensing isn't always as simple as it sounds. Sometimes a person who owns a product can use a piece of the product on another system. It might be ok for me to use my Mac's Osaka font on Windows running natively on my Mac (I haven't checked and don't have the energy to do so).

Font Book on my mac running 10.6.4 says:

	Location	/Library/Fonts/Osaka.ttf
	Unique name	Apple Computer Osaka, 6.1d3e1, 2008-08-18
	Copyright	ver J-6.1d3e1, © 1990-2008 Apple Inc.
	Trademark	HeiseiKakuGothic is a typeface developed under the license agreement with JSA Font Development and Promotion Center
	Copy protected	No
	Embeddable	Yes

So, first of all, it isn't a dfont, it's a ttf. It's also embeddable (whether that's interesting, I dunno).

HeiseiKakuGothic appears to have been initially developed for/with IBM and a number of places seem to offer to sell it:
http://www.fontmarketplace.com/font/heisei-kaku-gothic.aspx/294
http://www.ascendercorp.com/font/heisei-kaku-gothic/

Some flavor also seems available from Adobe...

some places seem to offer something like it for download:
http://www.latestdown.com/heisei+kaku+gothic+font.html
http://www.azfonts.net/load_font/heiseikakugostd_w5.html
http://www.searchfreefonts.com/font/heisei-kaku-gothic-japanese.htm

Comment 6

[John Daggett (:jtd)]

Until we have a real testcase of some sort, marking this as UNCONFIRMED.

Comment 7

[Kohei Yoshino [:kohei]]

I've confirmed the hang with Firefox 3.6.12. No crash reports available.
The hang is not reproducible with Firefox 4 Beta nor nightly.

How to reproduce:

1. Download Osaka.zip which could be found at http://osaka.is.land.to/
2. Unzip it and install Osaka.ttc to Windows 7
3. Launch Firefox 3.6 with a clean profile
4. Go to CNET Japan http://japan.cnet.com/ and try to read the articles
5. Firefox hangs

Some users have reported Firefox does crash, so I'm leaving the summary of this bug.

* https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=Firefox+Osaka+%E3%82%AF%E3%83%A9%E3%83%83%E3%82%B7%E3%83%A5 (crash)
* https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=Firefox+Osaka+%E3%83%95%E3%83%AA%E3%83%BC%E3%82%BA (freeze)
* https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=Firefox+Osaka+%E3%83%8F%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B0 (hang)

Comment 8

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

(In reply to comment #7)
> I've confirmed the hang with Firefox 3.6.12. No crash reports available.
> The hang is not reproducible with Firefox 4 Beta nor nightly.
> 
> How to reproduce:
> 
> 1. Download Osaka.zip which could be found at http://osaka.is.land.to/
> 2. Unzip it and install Osaka.ttc to Windows 7
> 3. Launch Firefox 3.6 with a clean profile
> 4. Go to CNET Japan http://japan.cnet.com/ and try to read the articles
> 5. Firefox hangs

I tried this on my Windows 7 machine and was not able to reproduce the problem using a recent 3.6.13pre build - the CNET Japan articles displayed fine, and the browser continued to work.

If you can get a stack for the hang (or crash) that might be helpful.

I notice that although the Osaka.ttc file here is not identical to the Osaka files that I currently have on OS X 10.6.5, it does appear to be a derivative of an older version of Apple's font (as indicated by the copyright notices in the font, as well as the presence of Mac-specific font tables such as fdsc, feat, mort and prop. It seems highly probable that this is a "hacked" version of Apple's font (it's had Windows-style embedded bitmaps added, replacing the Mac-style ones). You could try running Microsoft's Font Validator tool (see http://www.microsoft.com/typography/FontValidator.mspx) to see whether it detects problems in the font.

Comment 9

[Benoit Girard (:BenWa)]

The crash was not reproduced on 4.0+ by the original reporter and not reproduced in general by anyone else. Please re-open if you have steps to reproduce with the current firefox release.