Unfortunately, we have never really finished our Unicode support. The font
architecture in Mozilla has made it very hard for us to come up with a
proper way to fix this.
On Windows and every other platform except OS/2, it is possible to query
any font to see if it supports a particular glyph. So all Windows does is
ask the font "do you have this glyph?" If it does not, it finds one that
does. We can't do that on OS/2.
So on other platforms, they are able to do all their font rendering in
UTF-8, by simply using the font that corresponds to the charset that was
passed in, and then using the "find font for glyph" to fill in characters
that aren't available in that font.
On OS/2, we take the charset that we are passed with the page and convert
the entire page to that native charset and display it - we don't display
anything in UTF-8. So when you view a Russian page, we convert the Unicode
that Mozilla sends us into Win1251 and display it. We have tried displaying
everything in UTF-8, but it does not work. The reason is because most OS/2
fonts do not support UTF-8, so you just get junk. We would have to display
every page in Times New Roman MT 30.
You're next question is probably "If you get the charset, why not just
display page with the utf-8 charset tag in the UTF-8 codepage and use Times
New Roman MT 30?" The answer to that is that when Mozilla gives the page
to the font engine, it tells us that UTF-8 pages are in Western. There is
no way for us to know at the font end that a page is actually a UTF-8 page.
So we treat UTF-8 pages as western because we don't know any better.
We are very open to suggestions on this. This particular problem is
probably the biggest Warpzilla problem at this time.
Mike Kaply
IBM
an lam wrote:
> Warpzilla 0.9.2 does not handle Unicode (UTF-8) correctly. All the
> characters used on the website http://www.univiet.com/ are in the
> Times New Roman MT30 font, but Warpzilla does not display some of the
> characters. It displays them as boxes. Navigator 4.08 on Windows
> displays the same website correctly.
>
> I have tested Warpzilla 0.9.2 on OS/2 Warp 3 (FP 36). I have found
> that it is faster and more stable than previous versions. I set
> Western font to Helvetica and Unicode (UTF-8) font to Times New Roman
> MT30. When I visited a Unicode (UTF-8) web site, I noticed that
> Warpzilla used the Helvetica font to display the page. I changed the
> Western font to Times New Roman MT30, then it displayed the page with a
> lot of boxes.
>
> Thanks for the great improvement in Warpzilla 0.9.2.
>
> An Lam
