788450 - Polytonic Greek (for reading ancient texts) does not display on Android, OK on IOS etc.

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[john.wheater]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0
Build ID: 20120824154833

Steps to reproduce:

Loaded this page of Ancient Greek on my Google Nexus 7, running Android JB:

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/citequery3.pl?dbname=GreekFeb2011&query=Hdt.%201.10&getid=0



Actual results:

It displays hopelessly garbled on the Android, but fine on Mac OS, Windows etc.


Expected results:

It should display the same on Android as on other platforms.

(Note this is a problem common to many Android apps, but they say it can be addressed by individual apps, of which FF is a splendid example).

Comment 1

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

On my Galaxy Nexus some of the glyphs are replaced by grey boxes, but over half of them appear fine. The page seems to use straight up UTF-8 characters, so I suspect it's just that the font is missing glyphs for those characters.

CC'ing jonathan kew since I'm not sure who should own this.

Comment 2

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Yes, this is simply a case of the device lacking any font that supports those characters. We're aiming to address this by shipping additional fonts, either bundled with the Firefox package and/or downloaded on demand if the user tries to view a page that requires additional character coverage.

Bug 619521 is about platform support for adding fonts on-the-fly as needed. Not just marking this as a dupe, however, as the full solution also requires decisions about user interface (bug 648548), what fonts to offer, infrastructure to provide them, etc.

Comment 3

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

I'm working on bug 619521 and bug 648548. Does "Polytonic Greek" correspond to any Unicode script

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Script_%28Unicode%29#Table_of_scripts_in_Unicode

or is it just "Grek" or "Copt"? Also, which open source fonts cover these characters?

Comment 4

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.