995254 - Measure impact of adding font sets to multilocale APK to support locales whose characters are not supported in Android's Roboto font set

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Jeff Beatty [:gueroJeff]]

There's been some concern about font support for locales that are not supported across all Android devices. This has been spurred on by our efforts to ship Indic locales due to increasing availability of Android devices in that region that support some, but not all Indic locales. Results from survey of the India Mozilla communty suggest that users in India have had to install new fonts onto their devices in order to properly render app UI. I would like to explore the possibility of adding a font for these Indic languages within the multilocale APK. 

Many in the India survey reported installing the Lohit font on their Android devices to support Indic locales. Can we explore what would be required to ship the Lohit fonts as secondary default fonts for both rendered content (about: pages) and app elements? Other fonts mentioned in the survey were Kaumudi and Meera.

The research performed in this bug will also help to inform the way that we add new locales to the multilocale APK post-UI lang switching, as some may be minority languages that require unique, Unicode-enabled font sets.

Comment 1

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

To consider:

* Is this something we could download OTA?
* Otherwise, could we only unpack the fonts if the user switches to a locale that needs them?

* Can we switch fonts as we switch locales?

To measure:

* What's the file size impact?

Comment 2

[Jeff Beatty [:gueroJeff]]

Seems like the file size impact will vary. We could test it out looking at Free Sans and/or DejaVu Sans:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Sans
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DejaVu_fonts

Comment 3

[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.