973774 - Fira typeface missing Vietnamese characters

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Trung Ngo]

Attachment: Settings.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:27.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/27.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140205004602

Steps to reproduce:

The Firefox OS' Fira typeface doesn't contain some specific characters
for Vietnamese and the system has to fallback to another typeface for
those characters. This can be seen in the following images (also attached):

Home screen: http://i.imgur.com/ZQKknFd.png
Settings: http://i.imgur.com/7sMa6If.png

Bellow is a similar issue with the Ubuntu Font Family. It contains some detailed documents that can help with implementing the Vietnamese characters.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-font-family/+bug/656690

Comment 1

[Trung Ngo]

Attachment: Home.png

Comment 2

[arky [:arky]]

@jfkthame

Any thoughts?

Comment 3

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

I guess the Vietnamese letters were not part of the original requirements given to the font designers who created Fira for us.

The plan is for Mozilla to manage ongoing maintenance and development of the Fira fonts as an open-source font project. Once we have the infrastructure and processes set up to handle this, we'll be able to extend the character repertoire to cover VN and other languages that are currently unsupported.

Comment 4

[Trung Ngo]

Thanks. That's very informative. I hope the plan will go on well and won't stay dormant forever like the Ubuntu font. :)

Comment 5

[arky [:arky]]

Perhaps we can use Droid font family for Vietnamese. What is process to make Vietnamese locale use this font family instead of Fira ?

Comment 6

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

(In reply to arky [:arky] from comment #5)
> Perhaps we can use Droid font family for Vietnamese. What is process to make
> Vietnamese locale use this font family instead of Fira ?

I don't think there's any way we can do this, unless we made a special build with different default font prefs. (And we'd probably have to restore Droid faces that we've pulled out of the build.) We just need to push forward with extending the Fira character set, IMO.

Patryk, are we close to being able to take over this work? IIRC, we were waiting on a further update from the original designers.

Comment 7

[Patryk Adamczyk [:patryk] UX]

Ralph is working on the fonts now (we got approval last month), he should be finished by the end of the month.

Comment 8

[Trung Ngo]

Closed on upstream.
https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/issues/19