When viewing kottke.org with Pango-enabled Firefox, the generic glyph-can't-be-found-numbers-in-boxes glyph is displayed for U+2009 THIN SPACE instead of the actual glyph. Displaying the page in Firefox with MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO set results in an actual space. Viewing U+2009 in the GNOME Character Map also displays a space, so I do actually have that glyph in a font somewhere that Pango can find.
Created attachment 111863 [details] Incorrect rendering of kottke.org
Created attachment 111864 [details] Correct rendering of kottke.org
Please Also : http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=157565 Nicholas Miell : What is locale? This problem is probably pango's bug.
The locale is en_US.UTF-8, but copying and pasting text from Mozilla to other GNOME apps (gEdit) results in a missing glyph, so I'm willing to believe that this is a Pango problem and not a Firefox problem.
Blizzard, any idea here?
I suspect that since we're just handing off font descriptions and character data to pango that pango isn't finding that particular glyph. What I wonder is why xft/fontconfig can find the glyph and pango can not. (It's just \u2009. Nothing too sexy.)
The Pango policy is that it will never select a font just to use it for a whitespace character. The plan is that it should just emulate missing space glyphs, though that isn't currently implemented. See notes near the end of: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=145275