709159 - Need method to support MathML fonts without rooting the device

Status: NEW

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

I think it would be nice to provide a methodology to add the fonts required for doing MathML on an Android device without having to install fonts in /system/fonts (which I believe would require rooting the device).

I think it should be nice to have a preference for alternate font location that would perhaps default to someplace (on Android) like /mnt/sdcard/.fonts or something else reasonable.

I am fairly certain this is NOT filed on the correct component purposely because I wanted to start on a component where the owners/peers would understand the issue.

Comment 1

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

I decided to move this to a more correct component and just CC the right people.  The idea here is to add a preference for an alternate font file location that is searched before the system location for all Operating systems (although the original issue was because the System location for fonts on Android is not writable by the device owner).

Comment 2

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

Attachment: MathML start page using system fonts

screenshhot showing MathML issue using system fonts

Comment 3

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

Attachment: MathMLTorture test using system fonts

Comment 4

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

ISTR another bug report suggesting adding bin/res/fonts to the search path, for international text support.

Comment 5

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

FYI: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=36011

Comment 6

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

We could detect when the user tries to view a page that uses MathML, and offer to download STIX fonts on the fly and save them (e.g. in the profile) so that they're available. See bug 619521 and bug 648548 for the international-text version of this; basically, math could be treated as another "script" for which we can fetch fonts on demand if the device doesn't have them available.

Comment 7

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

(In reply to Jonathan Kew (:jfkthame) from comment #6)

Thanks Jonathan. The Gecko Patch from bug 295193 provides a way to detect when MathML fonts are needed and could probably be used in combination with your UI patch from bug 648548.