[Trac #220] Arabic is not rendered correctly in gecko

Wed Oct 25 15:15:27 EDT 2006

#220: Arabic is not rendered correctly in gecko
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 Reporter:  khassounah  |        Owner:  khassounah
     Type:  defect      |       Status:  new       
 Priority:  high        |    Milestone:  BTest-1   
Component:  sugar       |   Resolution:            
 Keywords:              |  
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Comment (by khassounah):

 Replying to [comment:7 marco]:
 > The reason you can't change font for http://www.google.com/intl/ar/ is
 that google specifies sans-serif as family. Try to remove it and things
 will work.
 >
 > I *think* the reason is that sans-serif is mapped by font-config to one
 of the fonts installed on the system. I should check if that's actually
 the right behavior. Anyway one way or another I'm sure that we can change
 that association.
 >
 > So, what I need to be able to fix this is a list of fonts we need to use
 for Arabic content. One for serif, one for sans-serif and one for
 monospace.

 That is not totally accurate, if the page was created correctly, changing
 the font used for sans-serif should cause that font to be used in
 rendering the page. The problem with google's page is that it doesn't have
 the lang="ar" property on any of its tags (ar.wikipedia.org does and it
 works in gecko like a charm). Try saving the page locally and add the
 lang="ar" attribute to <html> and you'll be able to configure fonts
 perfectly.

 Pango does have the logic which causes it to find a font with a character
 map containing the character being rendered, and it does seem to work
 since arabic text is being rendered. The problem is that which font it
 chooses is (so far) completely arbitrary to me, and it seems to pick the
 first font configured in the system.

 I am talking to Owen to try to find out how to get Pango to choose the
 right font, but adding the fonts to the distribution would be an excellent
 first step. Recommended font configuration was included in another note.

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Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/220#comment:11>
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