>It seems I asked practically the same question about font display back in July >this year, to which Smokey Ardisson replied:
>>Without seeing the website and the fonts it's hard to say for certain, but >>there are a number of bugs where Gecko doesn't recognize certain fonts, or >>glyphs within fonts, on the Mac. You could be hitting one of those bugs. >Is that really all the information I can get? Since you provided a website here, I took a look at it :-) The site you provided <http://www.learntibetan.net/helpfont.htm> is written in such a way that requires using an old, non-standard, pre-Unicode font*, which is pretty dodgy these days. The web and its browsers are moving rapidly to a Unicode-based model, away from legacy standards and certainly away from non-standards random fonts like those employed by this website. That said, the issue here doesn't seem to be a hole in Gecko's support for certain scripts as I mentioned in July. It seems Gecko is simply failing to recognize the "TibetanMachineWeb" font and is only recognizing the "TibetanMachineWeb1" font (the downloaded font file consists of 10 separate fonts inside). It may be bug 246527 <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=246527> (which does seem to strike non-Roman languages disproportionately) or it might be a bug in the way the fonts were made. >That if I want to look at any of the websites that might, just might, be using >those Tibetan fonts (or presumably any of a great variety of other language >fonts), then I had better be using another browser? That's a real >disappointment! Is there any hope on the horizen? There are two pieces of good news. First, it seems like Gecko does a decent job handling real, standards-compliant Unicode Tibetan, at least as far as I can tell from Alan Wood's test page <http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/tibetan.html>. So sites that are done using Unicode Tibetan should work. With respect to other languages and scripts, generally the holes are pretty small, like not being able to set certain fonts as default in the preferences or some characters showing up in another font (but as the right character). The worst case, as far as I'm aware, is the support for South Asian languages; Gecko on Mac OS X currently can't do the glyph reordering that's required (it needs ATSUI). And probably Mongolian, since it requires contextual shaping like Arabic AND is written vertically--but that's a challenge for everyone yet! Second, and more generally, the next big step for Gecko on Mac OS X is to a new, modern architecture for graphics and text-rendering. No more QuickDraw, no more whatever we're using for text now (maybe QuickDraw for that, too); hello Quartz and ATSUI (the same text drawing routines used in Safari and most of the OS, with really top-notch support even for less-common scripts. It's just slow unless you feed it text in a certain way, which Gecko's not set up to do yet.) After the latest series of releases come out, Josh will be locked in a closet and made to develop lots of this new code. Or something like that; obviously Mike and Simon and Josh are the ones to ask here :-) Sorry, you didn't ask for a novel (or a lecture), but I'm afraid my reply has become one, if not both :-( I hope I was at least somewhat informative rather than confusing and answered your questions. Smokey * In Unicode, every character in each of the world's writing systems has its own "codepoint", so each can be written and shared unambiguously across the Internet (and all on the same webpage, if one wanted). Prior to that, people often made fonts where the replaced the Roman characters with the ones from another writing system, so that the codepoint for, say, a, was used for the Hebrew letter aleph. In pages which specified that particular font, text appeared as the author intended, but the actual text itself was gibberish in Roman letters. Not good for unambiguous interoperability and data exchange, because proper understanding depended on appearance, and appearance depended on the author and all recipeints having the same non-standard font. And some other, more complex issues :-) This was particularly common for "less common" languages and writing systems, but Mac OS versions before 8.5 or 9 did it for Greek (with the Symbol font). _______________________________________________ Camino mailing list [email protected] http://mozdev.org/mailman/listinfo/camino
