At 8:10 PM +0000 on 3/8/06, Bernd wrote:
I wonder if Camino is supposed to display Unicode characters with a
different font in case the font that is currently used does not offer
a specific character.
Yes, it is supposed to. Font fallback in Gecko
is pretty broken in a number of cases...too much
crufty code from the Mac OS. There are a couple
of Gecko devs working on fixing a lot of the Mac
font bugs in tandem with the Cairo gfx work on
the trunk, so the situation won't keep sucking
forever.
But the issue below is not a Gecko one,
amazingly. There's font code out there that
sucks worse, and this al-Hakim hits it...
For example, the URL below points to a document
with dotted letters (Paragraph 7, first line) it should read al-?Çkim,
but the ? is displayed H and a placeholder box next to it. Other OS X
apps would simply replace the used font with another that can display
the character. Why not Camino?
http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft1w100463&doc.view=content&chunk.id=ch1&toc.depth=1&anchor.id=d0e458&brand=eschol#X
Safari doesn't do this either--nor does
TextEdit--at least on 10.3.9. Apple's ATSUI
font-fallback is still sort of brain-dead
sometimes and will sometimes choose a font that
contains the character, even if it's not the
*best* font for that character (in this case,
falling back to something other than TITUS
CyberBit, which would be the best choice of the
fonts I have on my Mac).
The issue in the al-Hakim case in the page in
question is two-fold: the H is not the
precomposed H-with-dot-below U+1E24 character,
but rather a normal ASCII H and then U+0323
(Combining Dot Below). It's my understanding
that the Combining Diacritical Marks block is
poorly supported in Mac OS X font/text APIs, and,
to add insult to injury, lots of fonts claim to
include those characters when they really don't
(thus the box). If you look at U+0323 in
Character Palette, you'll see that most of the
fonts that appear (fonts that claim they include
the character) either show a blank space or the
box; I have 270 fonts/weights/styles claiming to
include the character but only 23 that actually
show the dot).
So in this case I don't think you're seeing a
Gecko/Camino bug at all, but rather a bug in your
fonts claiming to include more characters than
they do; if the font claims to include the
character, the character is displayed (blank or
box as it may be); we don't even hit the buggy
Mac OS X or Gecko font-fallback routines :-(
Smokey
(apologies for the missing/changed characters;
I'm still using Eudora for this address, and
Eudora's current i18n/Unicode support sucks even
worse than Gecko's or Mac OS X's ;) )
--
Smokey Ardisson
Graduate Student in Middle Eastern and African History
Georgetown University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.geocities.com/sardisson/
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