649655 - Add "DejaVu Serif" in the css for http://www.mozilla.com/mk/firefox/

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[Damjan Georgievski]

There are 2 variants of the cyrillic letters when using a serif italic typeface, as is used on http://www.mozilla.com/mk/firefox/ for the welcome message.

Unfortunetally the macedonian styling (variant) of the cyrillic letters are not implemented in most Microsoft fonts. The only widely spread fonts that do support the mk locale are the free "DejaVu Serif" fonts shipped with probably all Gnu/Linux distributions.

Mozilla CSS files for http://www.mozilla.com/mk/firefox/ use "font-family: georgia,serif" which looks strange when used to display the macedonian language. I'd suggest to add "DejaVu Serif" as first option in that list, so that at least our Linux users will see the correct version of the text (and anyone else that would install these fonts).

The css files I've found to be affected are:
http://mozcom-cdn.mozilla.net/style/covehead/content.css
http://mozcom-cdn.mozilla.net/style/covehead/landing-page-l10n-fx4.css

Comment 1

[Damjan Georgievski]

To see the difference between the macedonian/serbiean italic letters and the russian/bulgarian take a look at these images:
macedonian:
http://damjan.softver.org.mk/italic/italic-mk.png
russian:
http://damjan.softver.org.mk/italic/italic-ru.png

Those were created with
pango-view --font="DejaVu Serif Italic 24px" --language={ru,mk}

Comment 2

[Pascal Chevrel (relman team) -> :pascalc]

Damjan, you mean that Macedonian/Serbian should use Deja Vu by default and Russian/Ukrainian/Belarusian... should use Georgia, right ?

Comment 3

[Damjan Georgievski]

DejaVu does the right thing, since it has OpenType "locl" support for many languages, so it can be used for all of those languages.

Firefox 4 on Linux (at least, haven't tested Windows/OS X) will choose the correct glyphs based on the "lang" attribute in the HTML page (although there's some caching involved that compicates matters, but I hope it'll be solved).

Anyway, the default styling in both DejaVu and Georgia is the russian/bulgarian one, so there wont be any changes for other users.


some references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pango#Support_for_OpenType_features
http://jankojs.tripod.com/SerbianCyr.htm
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24139
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=449292

Comment 4

[Damjan Georgievski]

ps.
looking at the Georgia font that's commonly available on Linux distros (ver 2.05) and the one from Windows7, either of them don't have any "locl" support for macedonian or serbian. 
The older doesn't have any OpenType tables, the newer has support for Romanian and Lithuanian only.

Comment 5

[Milos Dinic [:Milos]]

Damjan,

It's not a problem for us to add a special CSS rule which would be applied on certain languages only, like Macedonian and Serbian. That said, I'd like us to discuss this a bit more, as I'd like to make sure there are no better options for us.

I'm CCing Filip in this bug - Filip is Firefox l10n coordinator for Serbian - so he can be in the loop.

Now, I'd be satisfied with a font that looks somewhat similar to the font that we currently use for all locales. If you have any other propositions, don't hesitate to comment here.

Comment 6

[Damjan Georgievski]

> That said, I'd like us to discuss this a bit more, as I'd like to make sure 
> there are no better options for us.

And? Why do you think this is not a good option overall?

Comment 7

[Gordon P. Hemsley [:GPHemsley]]

Bug 694205 fixed the caching issue mentioned in comment 3.

The only way to get the different rendering of the Serbian/Macedonian glyphs is to use a font that is able to take advantage of the lang attribute.

The testcases on the aforementioned bug demonstrate that DejaVu Serif is one such font (and it looks similar enough to Georgia to me).

Comment 8

[Kohei Yoshino [:kohei]]

This page has been redesigned and the Georgia font is gone.