61961 - Mozilla confuses itself with symbol fonts in MathML

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: MathML, defect, P3)

Description

[Ian Hutchinson]

Mozilla has unsatisfactory handling of symbol fonts on Linux.
_____________________________________________________________

Summary: With aliases defined to enable Mozilla to access the symbol font
every letter in MathML is rendered in the symbol font!


In order to render characters in HTML from the adobe-symbol fonts,
which are essential for mathematics, it is necessary under X to define some
aliases:

!___________________________Cut here__________________________________________
! 100dpi aliases to fool Netscape into symbol support in iso8859 encoding.
-adobe-symbol-medium-r-normal--11-80-100-100-p-61-iso8859-1 -adobe-symbol-medium
-r-normal--11-80-100-100-p-61-adobe-fontspecific
-adobe-symbol-medium-r-normal--14-100-100-100-p-85-iso8859-1 -adobe-symbol-mediu
m-r-normal--14-100-100-100-p-85-adobe-fontspecific
-adobe-symbol-medium-r-normal--17-120-100-100-p-95-iso8859-1 -adobe-symbol-mediu
m-r-normal--17-120-100-100-p-95-adobe-fontspecific
-adobe-symbol-medium-r-normal--20-140-100-100-p-107-iso8859-1 -adobe-symbol-medi
um-r-normal--20-140-100-100-p-107-adobe-fontspecific
-adobe-symbol-medium-r-normal--25-180-100-100-p-142-iso8859-1 -adobe-symbol-medi
um-r-normal--25-180-100-100-p-142-adobe-fontspecific
-adobe-symbol-medium-r-normal--34-240-100-100-p-191-iso8859-1 -adobe-symbol-medi
um-r-normal--34-240-100-100-p-191-adobe-fontspecific


These cause the symbol fonts to be regarded by Mozilla, Netscape and friends
as part of the default iso-8859-1 set. They can therefore be accessed in
documents, e.g. by <font face="symbol">. Actually, Netscape has a more
palatable solution, namely adding the Xresource:

Netscape*documentFonts.charset*adobe-fontspecific:   iso-8859-1

Which has the same effect. This does not work with Mozilla, so the aliases
are then necessary. Details of this issue have long been documented in detail
at http://hutchinson.belmont.ma.us/tth/Xfonts.html

Unfortunately the MathML enabled mozilla is confused by the aliases. When
they are absent. MathML rendering works tolerably. When the aliases are
present, however, every letter in MathML is rendered in the symbol font!

Comment 1

[Keyser Sose]

Reporter is this still a problem in the latest nightlies?

Comment 2

[Fabian Guisset]

Marking all unconfirmed MathML bugs "new". Since there is no latest build with
MathML enabled, it is not possible to test this.

Comment 3

[rbs]

Ian, could you attach your screenshot using the 'Create a new attachment'
option. thanks.

I suspect that the reported confusion is not confined to MathML only, and if 
you style, e.g., <p style="font-family: symbol"> some text </p>, then that
paragraph will exhibits the same problem when the aliases are set.

Comment 4

[Ian Hutchinson]

Attachment: Patch to mathml.css exchanging order of Times and Symbol

Comment 5

[Ian Hutchinson]

Attachment: Explanation of proposed patch to mathml.css. Swap of Symbol and Times

Comment 6

[Keyser Sose]

Adding patch keyword.

Comment 7

[rbs]

The patch suggests to re-order the font-family so that Times is selected before
Symbol. This isn't good because, by default, we want the '+', '-', and other
overlapping math symbols (e.g., &alpha, &beta, etc), to be selected from a
nicer scientific font when we are in the <math> environment. Also, we want to
be able to adjust the order as more free fonts become available without be
restricted by many assumptions such are that from which this bug emanated.

There is another way for users to override the default CSS rules--by editing
userContent.css (for the content window) or userChrome.css (for the UI).
So we could take it that if some users are adventurous enough to turn their
Symbol font into an iso 8859-1 font, they may well also override the affected
CSS rules in their userContent.css.

Resolving as wontfix.