861724 - Zawgyi-One font is not loaded in Firefox 20 Mac OS X

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

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

Description

[Htain Lin Shwe]

Attachment: bug.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_3) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.65 Safari/537.31

Steps to reproduce:

Already install zawgyi.ttf from http://mmwebfonts.comquas.com/fonts/zawgyi.ttf .
Upgrade firefox 20.
Open http://bit.ly/zguni 



Actual results:

Font is not showing correct on Mac OS X. Check on windows and it's working. Check on Chrome Mac OS X and it's working. Check on Safari Mac OS X and it's working.


Expected results:

Zawgyi-One font should be load and display correctly in website.

Comment 1

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (privacy/fingerprinting team)]

Thank you for reporting this!  I see another user is having a similar problem in the Support forums: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/956278


I wonder if this is related to this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=706221 -- I am classifying it as a core layout bug to see if they can help.

Comment 2

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

(In reply to Liz Henry :lizzard from comment #1)
> Thank you for reporting this!  I see another user is having a similar
> problem in the Support forums:
> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/956278
> 
> 
> I wonder if this is related to this bug:
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=706221 -- I am classifying it
> as a core layout bug to see if they can help.

No, this is different.

The issue here is that the Zawgyi-One font lacks proper layout tables for Myanmar. When loading fonts for "complex" scripts (that require appropriate glyph shaping for correct rendering), Firefox on OS X checks whether the font has the necessary tables, and if not, it will skip it and fall back to a different font.

This font is apparently using the Unicode Myanmar codepoints, but is designed to be used -without- proper shaping support, by instead encoding the text in a "visual" way rather than properly following the Unicode standard for representing Myanmar text.

We're not going to invest time in trying to support hacks like this. There is a Unicode standard for Myanmar, and an increasing number of fonts that support it. That's what people should be using for interoperable Myanmar text on the web.

(One other thing: I notice that this font appears to be based on a hacked version of Microsoft's Tahoma; as such, I suspect that it is in breach of the Tahoma license terms.)

Comment 3

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (privacy/fingerprinting team)]

Thanks Jonathan!

Htain Lin Shwe, maybe that doesn't help your immediate need, but I wonder if you can find whoever created the zawgyi font and let them know how they can improve it?

Comment 4

[Htain Lin Shwe]

Thanks.