776967 - Font display issue with Fulah Unicode glyphs

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(www.mozilla.org :: Pages & Content, defect)

Description

[Verdi [:verdi] Best to slack me]

Attachment: Fulah font issue on what's new page

Copied from https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/l10n-forum/708514

In Firefox localized pages, fonts don't display these characters correctly: Ɓ ɓ Ƴ ƴ Ŋ ŋ Ɗ ɗ... they seem to be replaced by a locally Unicode available font as shown on this picture.

We should find a solution maybe by using more standard Unicode font or design these glyhs for the font that Mozilla is using on the website.

Comment 1

[Anthony Ricaud (:rik)]

Thanks for the report.

Comment 2

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

Not a duplicate, Fulah is an African language  with a couple special unique glyphs, I think Open Sans doesn't support it at all, I am almost sure that fixing bug 776905 won't solve this one.

Comment 3

[Ibrahima SARR]

Four glyphs exactly (Extended Latin B)
Ɓ ɓ Ƴ ƴ Ŋ ŋ Ɗ ɗ

Comment 4

[Kohei]

Still relevant.

Comment 5

[Ibrahima SARR]

Thanks for the workaround. But maybe a Sans Serif font would match Open Sans better. Also, I believe Mozilla should not use a font that don't support languages that are active like Fulah.
It is so easy for the creator of Open Sans to add Extended Latin glyphs!

Comment 6

[Kohei]

Attachment: ff whatsnew page, Open Sans Light & M+ 2c light

Hey guys, good news! My favorite Japanese font family M+ has the missing glyphs and "M+ 2c light" could be a fine combination with Open Sans Light. See the attached screenshot. M+ is a free font, so we can borrow those glyphs. Do you wanna try it?

http://mplus-fonts.sourceforge.jp/mplus-outline-fonts/design/index-en.html

Comment 7

[Kohei]

Actually the Mozilla Japan Web site (mozilla.jp) had been using the M+ font family before replacing with a similar Web font.

Comment 8

[Kohei]

Attachment: Font Book screenshot

Comment 9

[Kohei]

Attachment: /ff/firefox/new/ screenshot on Ubuntu

Comment 10

[Kohei]

Attachment: Pull Request on GitHub

Comment 11

[[github robot]]

Commits pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/abdbd718178216f780091f7b0a14611824ed42f3
Fix Bug 776967 - Font display issue with Fulah Unicode glyphs

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/066deaea150f9f32ae4a1d2b8a755f911c24d006
Merge pull request #1677 from kyoshino/bug-776967-fulah-font

Fix Bug 776967 - Font display issue with Fulah Unicode glyphs

Comment 12

[Kohei]

Looks nice! https://www-dev.allizom.org/ff/firefox/25.0/whatsnew/

Comment 13

[raymond [:retornam] (inactive)]

fixed on https://www.allizom.org/ff/firefox/new/

Comment 14

[Kohei]

Comment on attachment 8373206 [details]
/ff/firefox/new/ screenshot on Ubuntu

Actually the current /ff/firefox/new/ page is an old version and Open Sans is no used. I think this fix is only for /ff/firefox/*/whatsnew/.

Comment 15

[Ibrahima SARR]

Open Sans is a very nice font but it lacks dozens of glyphs for non Western languages. It is a shame that Mozilla used such a limited font that does not cover most African languages. When we mean global, we mean more languages supported, don't we?
Thanks all

Comment 16

[Kohei]

I don't know if there is Open Sans alternatives. We cannot cover all languages with one single font. Technically it might be possible, but think about Asian languages; Japanese, my mother tongue, has thousands of characters and the size of the original M+ font file is 1.5 MB. It's still a subset of all Japanese characters. Forcing users to download a 1.5 MB font file is not acceptable, right?

Luckily M+ is a free, good combination with Open Sans and it has many glyphs that are missing in Open Sans. Like Fulah, we can generate it's subset anytime to offer a great Web experience to everyone while reducing the bandwidth usage of users. It requires a little additional work but I believe it's a realistic approach.

Comment 17

[Kohei]

FYI, the subset I have generated for Fulah is only 1.7 KB.