Bug 12483 – Gothic characters displayed as boxes at wikipedia.org

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: CONFIGURATION CHANGED
• Component: Layout and Rendering

[Andre-John Mas]

When I visit http://www.wikipedia.org/ I notice that some fonts aren't being rendered correctly. I would expect them to be rendered correctly. I have confirmed this with nightly r19247, on MacOS X 10.4.8

[Andre-John Mas]

Created attachment 12802 [details]
Capture showing the symptoms reported

The symptoms are shown in the attached screen capture.

[David Kilzer (:ddkilzer)]

Please provide a URL to an example page, either in a comment or in the URL field in the bug.  Thanks!

[Andre-John Mas]

A quick discussion with a friend suggests that this may be due to no suitable font being found. The most complete font around is apparently 'Arial Unicode MS', which comes with MS-Windows. Copying that over from a Windows system seems to have reduced the number of misrendered characters.

The resolution to this issue might be for Apple to provide a suitably complete font with MacOS X, in the same manner as Arial Unicode MS.

[Andre-John Mas]

Created attachment 12803 [details]
Reduced symptoms after addition of Arial Unicode MS

(In reply to comment #3)
> The resolution to this issue might be for Apple to provide a suitably complete
> font with MacOS X, in the same manner as Arial Unicode MS.

Please file a Mac OS X enhancement request on the subject! You can file the request at <http://bugreport.apple.com> (requires ADC membership; online membership is free; if you do not want to sign up, you can use <http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/bugrptform.html>).

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Most problems visible at this page are indeed caused by missing fonts, and certainly do not indicate WebKit bugs.

However, Gothic characters are rendered as empty boxes (instead of Last Resort characters), and this is wrong. Re-titling the bug to reflect this, as this might turn out to be a WebKit issue.

[Andre-John Mas]

For the benefit of Apple developers reading this bug, the associated Apple bug number is 4964357.

(In reply to comment #6)
> However, Gothic characters are rendered as empty boxes (instead of Last Resort
> characters), and this is wrong.

Is it? Anyway, the difference is due to the different code paths being used. On Tiger, the simple code path uses the "missing glyph" glyph from the primary font, and the complex code path uses the last resort font.

[David Kilzer (:ddkilzer)]

<rdar://problem/4964357>

[Karl Dubost]

Created attachment 466460 [details]
homepage of wikipedia with many languages

All the fonts seem to be displayed properly.

[Karl Dubost]

*** Bug 37646 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***