Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 98664
Chinese Font Problem
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:55:30 EDT
With the default RH9 installation, the display of big5 Chinese characters looks very weired in many occasions in mozilla. Some characters are in normal size while some are relatively small and so small that they may become illegible to read. But after highlighting the text, it improved a bit but still not very acceptable in my opinion. I came across bug 84034 about anti alias font but don't know if they are related. Strangely enough, when I got to this bug's page, I found a line of the text there appears completely blackened - highlighting it will make it legible again. Will try to attach some screenshots for illustration.
Created attachment 92771 [details] Google in Traditional Chinese Google in Traditional Chinese (http://www.google.com/intl/zh-TW/)
Created attachment 92772 [details] Bug 84034 Page Bugzilla Bug 84034 page (http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=84034)
Thanks for your report. Your bug report has two folds: - Are you using en_US.UTF-8? Because the site are in UTF-8, so mozilla does not know what font should be favor in, hence it is getting font from different fonts (very simliar reason to bug 84034). Changing the preferenced font or try to use zh_TW.Big5 should help. - texts appear to be blackened. Please see bug 89773. It is a bug on Xft which is fixed and awaiting for rebuild into our package. I am putting this as duplicate to 89773 for now. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 89773 ***
Thanks for hinting me about the xft problem. As for the google page - you are correct about it, it's UTF-8 encoded. But still changing the Unicode font preference didn't help. No matter what font I chose, the display still looked as bad as before. One thing that I feel strange is the behavior of Mozilla to pick up random fonts for different characters. I mean I only specified one font for all the Unicode font choices in the font preference - how can Mozilla got more than one font to display at the same line of display? I really cannot understand why. There must be a bug somewhere - perhaps it's a mozilla problem?
That's called font fallback, if there are no glyphs available for the font you have chosen, it will use next font which available. - Have you tried to use zh_TW.Big5? If you use any locale with zh_TW then you will have chinese font in higher priority on the font list so it will use it first - What font did you choose? Please try and choose AR PL Mingti2L Big5
I have tried every possible BIG5 font including AR PL Mingti2L Big5 - but still the problem didn't go away. The good news is when zh_TW.Big5 locale was used, the problem was gone. But I usually do not want to do this for several reasons - 1. Switching locale is troublesome enough; 2. I am not used to Chinese translation of the Mozilla menu; 3. The fonts used look ugly to me even for English! I don't know whether the font fallback is a problem or not. All I know is my English M$ XP can display the google page problem without any font problem in Mozilla.
Yes it is about font fallback. About the changing font does not effect the font usage - I have posted bug 99483 to confirm this with mozilla maintainer. M$ Win XP can able to display without any problem because they bought many unicode font and most of them covers one script range in one font. So you cannot see any problem. If you can have a breif test by using their fonts, then it should work. Try Severn beta 1, it should be a bit better because one of the font (ttfonts-ja) covers more chars in asian script range. Thanks for your report. We can continue the conversation on bug 99483
OK, perhaps I will try Severn later. Actually, I have also tried using Knoppix 3.2 - fonts look perfectly alright. Perhaps I will take some time to take a look of what they used for their fonts. BTW, the bug 99483 page says I am not authorzied to access it. :< Is there any way that I can get access to it?
That would be great. I added you to the cc: list. you should able to access the bug for now.