1392659 - Syriac unicode characters rendered as boxes on Mac

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, defect)

Description

[jonathan.abdo]

Attachment: Screen Shot 2017-08-22 at 11.42.46 AM.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:55.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/55.0
Build ID: 20170814073321

Steps to reproduce:

Environment: Firefox 55 / MacOS Sierra 10.12.6
1. Navigate to http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/syriac.html
2. Scroll down and make note of the character columns


Actual results:

The unicode characters in the Character columns are rendered as boxes instead of Syriac characters.


Expected results:

The unicode should have been rendered as Syriac characters.

Safari on Sierra renders this page and the Syriac characters correctly.

MacOS Sierra does not come with a font that renders Syriac installed. It does include a font that renders Syriac as a "Support Font". Which is accessible to an application if requested by name.
Ref: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT206872#document
Font: Noto Sans Syriac Eastern 1.03 uh 
Location on Mac: Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/Apple/Fonts/Language Support/

Comment 1

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

(In reply to jonathan.abdo from comment #0)

> MacOS Sierra does not come with a font that renders Syriac installed. It
> does include a font that renders Syriac as a "Support Font". Which is
> accessible to an application if requested by name.
> Ref: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT206872#document
> Font: Noto Sans Syriac Eastern 1.03 uh 
> Location on Mac: Macintosh HD/Library/Application
> Support/Apple/Fonts/Language Support/

Interesting -- I wasn't aware they were shipping these extra fonts. I guess we should probably activate them in Gecko so that they're available if the font fallback process encounters characters from these less-common scripts.

Comment 2

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Attachment: Activate fonts available in the macOS "Language Support" directory so that they're available in Gecko

We already have support for activating additional fonts at startup, as part of the (optional) MOZ_BUNDLED_FONTS code. So it's straightforward to refactor this slightly, and use the same approach (unconditionally) to activate the fonts in the Language Support folder. With this, the Syriac example page shows the Syriac characters as expected, using the appropriate Noto font.

Comment 3

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Try push with the above patch: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/#/jobs?repo=try&revision=4b145f9ec59a8b6cb9a99997f037db3a0e638372.

If you want to confirm whether it finds the additional fonts so that such pages display successfully, you should be able to get the test build from https://queue.taskcluster.net/v1/task/EUxcDomoTX6m5V1KaaJQBw/runs/0/artifacts/public/build/target.dmg and try it locally.

Comment 4

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Attachment: Activate fonts available in the macOS "Language Support" directory so that they're available in Gecko

This seems to work as expected in my testing. So do we want to add these fonts to Firefox's font list to improve the base level of support for less-common languages/scripts?

Comment 5

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/83526742b374
Activate fonts available in the macOS "Language Support" directory so that they are available in Gecko. r=jrmuizel

Comment 6

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/83526742b3740398c6434d8667f4440fea3a47ff
Bug 1392659 - Activate fonts available in the macOS "Language Support" directory so that they are available in Gecko. r=jrmuizel

Comment 7

[Sebastian Hengst [:aryx] (needinfo me if it's about an intermittent or backout)]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/83526742b374