Re: Pb with Unicode Tifinagh with Internet Explorer

From: Neil Harris (neil@tonal.clara.co.uk)
Date: Thu May 28 2009 - 07:41:15 CDT

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    Andrew West wrote:
    > 2009/5/28 Andrew Cunningham <lang.support@gmail.com>:
    >
    >> But that said ... no browser will allow you to set a preferred default font
    >> for Tifinagh.
    >>
    >
    > In my opinion, all browsers are broken in this respect.
    >
    >
    >> On Windows 7, IE8 will use Ebrima by default. The question is
    >> what will Firefox use as default for Tifinagh on Windows 7. Will you also be
    >> stuck with Ebrima in both IE and Firefox?
    >>
    >
    > It all depends on what other fonts you have on your system (see below).
    >
    >
    >> If anyone knows how and why Firefox selects fonts, I'd love to know.
    >>
    >
    > I've got seven working Tifinagh fonts on my system (Code2000, DejaVu
    > Sans, DejaVu Sans Condensed, Everson Mono, Hapax Berbère, Hapax
    > Touareg and Hapax Touareg DàG), but when I configure my default font
    > for Firefox to be something that does not cover Tifinagh (e.g. Arial)
    > the Tifinagh characters on
    > <http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/tifinagh.html> are rendered using the
    > Unicode BMP Fallback SIL font. If I then uninstall Unicode BMP
    > Fallback SIL and reload Firfox it now uses the LastResort font to
    > display the Tifinagh characters. Continuing to uninstall each font one
    > at a time, the order of priority is:
    >
    > 1. Unicode BMP Fallback SIL
    > 2. LastResort
    > 3. Hapax Touareg DàG
    > 4. Hapax Touareg
    > 5. Hapax Berbère
    > 6. Everson Mono
    > 7. DejaVu Sans Condensed
    > 8. DejaVu Sans
    > 9. Code2000
    >
    > i.e. reverse alphabetical order. I guess what Firefox is doing is
    > iterating through all fonts and checking for coverage of the Tifinagh
    > characters, and the last iterated font that has coverage is the font
    > that is used ... which is rather unfortunate if either Unicode BMP
    > Fallback SIL or LastResort is installed. On the other hand, if you are
    > a font developer and you want your Tifinagh font to be used by default
    > by Firefox then simply name it something like "ZZZMyTifinaghFont".
    >
    > (And if I uninstall all fonts with Tifinagh coverage Firefox displays
    > boxes with a hex codepoint value inside ... not from a built-in font,
    > but drawn dynamically I think, as the relative sizes of the hex digits
    > and their enclosing box varies at different zoom levels)
    >
    > Andrew
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >

    Andrew, Could you please file a bug report for this at
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ ?

    It should be fairly easy to fix this in the next revision of Firefox, if
    only by adding a bit of special-case code that puts "fallback" and "last
    resort" fonts earlier in the search list.

    -- Neil

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