[Trac #884] Web activity has trouble with arabic and urdu fonts

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#884: Web activity has trouble with arabic and urdu fonts
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 Reporter:  sj                          |        Owner:  marco  
     Type:  defect                      |       Status:  new    
 Priority:  blocker                     |    Milestone:  Trial-1
Component:  distro                      |   Resolution:         
 Keywords:  web activity fonts scripts  |  
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Comment (by behdad):

 Replying to [comment:13 tomeu]:
 > Replying to [comment:12 behdad]:
 > > This means that some of the fonts you ship have crappy Arabic glyphs.
 We can hide them using fontconfig, but even better is to remove them.
 >
 > Sorry, what means we have some fonts with crappy Arabic glyphs?

 For Arabic to render correctly, fonts need to have OpenType tables mapping
 Arabic chars to various glyphs they make take.  If the font doesn't have
 the tables, you get the wrong, disjoint, rendering.

 Many Chinese fonts are known to have this problem, because Arabic is used
 in Uighar language in China, and Chinese fonts have to have glyphs for
 Arabic to pass some certification level to be used in China...

 Bitmap fonts are also unusable for Arabic with Pango for the same reason.

 It is possible to fix the problem in Pango, though not going to change
 soon, but the main problem still remains: that the wrong font is chosen
 for Arabic.

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Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/884#comment:14>
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