659259 - Combining character doesn't work right in Georgia

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 609604

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

Description

[Florian J. [:FeuerFliege]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:6.0a1) Gecko/20110521 Firefox/6.0a1
Build Identifier: Build-Identifikator: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:6.0a1) Gecko/20110521 Firefox/6.0a1

Combining characters like ̈  doesn’t work right, if the the font “Gerorgia” is used. Mozilla pages often use Georgia.

I’ve noticed this bug at http://support.mozillamessaging.com/de/home because the German umlauts (üöä) there are produced with combining characters which is quite unusual.

If I change the font (with the Web Developer Add-on) the characters are composed in the right way.

I’ve found bug 654057 but I don’t know if they are related.





Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. write ü/ö/ä as u/o/a followed by ̈  (combining diaeresis)
2. make sure the used font is Georgia


Actual Results:  
the umlauts looks like u¨/o¨/a¨ (I’ve used the non-combining diaeresis here only to visualize the bug)

Expected Results:  
ü/ö/ä should look like ü/ö/ä

Comment 1

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

(In reply to comment #0)
> I’ve noticed this bug at http://support.mozillamessaging.com/de/home because
> the German umlauts (üöä) there are produced with combining characters which
> is quite unusual.

Why are combining characters used there? It's likely that this gives inferior results in a number of situations - many services/features such as search, text-to-speech, copy/paste (depending on the target application), etc, may not handle these as well as the precomposed forms.

Note that the use of precomposed characters is generally recommended on the Web. See for example http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html-css-normalization.

> I’ve found bug 654057 but I don’t know if they are related.

I think this is actually bug 609604, which discusses problems with combining characters in the Georgia font. (It's primarily a font defect.)

Comment 2

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Looking at the http://support.mozillamessaging.com/de/home, it appears to use a mixture of precomposed characters and combining sequences. Although in principle this shouldn't matter, as they are defined to be equivalent, in practice it's a really bad idea, as lots of software does not fully implement the equivalence for all purposes.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Might be worth filing a separate bug on the site....