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Issue metadata

Status: Duplicate
Merged: issue 245525
Owner:
Closed: Feb 2017
Components:
EstimatedDays: ----
NextAction: ----
OS: Windows
Pri: 2
Type: Bug



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Font fallback doesn't work for extremely archaic unicode characters

Reported by snowlist...@gmail.com, Oct 30 2016

Issue description

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/54.0.2840.71 Safari/537.36

Example URL:

Steps to reproduce the problem:
1. Set Arial as the default font, and go to any page that contains the archaic letter ꙋ (U+A64B, in Cyrillic Extended-B)
2. It doesn't show up. 
3. Change the default font to Segoe UI (which supports that letter), then the letter shows up.
4. With Segoe UI as default, the codepoint U+A69E in Cyrillic Extended-B doesn't show up, even though I have Quivira (a font supporting that codepoint) properly installed in my system.

This issue also occurs in archaic CJK characters. It seems to me that chrome uses Simsun as the fallback font to display Chinese. But Simsun doesn't cover CJK Ext-E. So whenever I copy/past a character in CJK Ext-E to a webpage, it shows a box. HanaMinB is the only publicly available font that fully supports this code block, and I have it in my system. It doesn't work in chrome.

(I noticed that the CJK Ext-E characters do show up correctly on wikipeda page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs_Extension_E 
I checked the underlying source code and discovered that it specified 'HanaMinB' in the font list that it wants the browser to use. But if you copy paste it to, say, google, or anywhere else, it becomes a box.)

What is the expected behavior?
If a codepoint is not in the default font or even the fallback font, chrome should scan the system font library and find a font that supports the codepoint. Only when none of the fonts in the font library contains that codepoint should chrome display a box.

But I think a better solution would be the following. Let experienced user determine which  font should be used for a particular unicode range. For example, there is not a single font that covers all CJK, CJK Ext A--E characters. No matter what font you designate as the fallback font for Chinese, it will always fail to display some portion of CJK characters, which total over 80,000 characters. I would like to use SimSun to render CJK, CJK Ext A--D, and HanaMinB for CJK Ext E. 

What went wrong?
(See description above.)

Does it occur on multiple sites: Yes

Is it a problem with a plugin? No 

Did this work before? No 

Does this work in other browsers? N/A

Chrome version: 54.0.2840.71  Channel: stable
OS Version: 10.0
Flash Version: Shockwave Flash 23.0 r0
 
I made a misstatement above. The codepoint U+A69E is not supported by Quivira, but by Everson Mono. I have Everson mono installed and the codepoint still doesn't show up on the web.

Comment 2 by tkent@chromium.org, Oct 30 2016

Components: -Blink Blink>Fonts
Cc: hdodda@chromium.org
Labels: Needs-Feedback
Could you please provide us the sample test case and screenshot of the actual and expected result. So that it would be helpful for us to triage the issue better.

Thanks !
font1.jpg
106 KB View Download
font2.jpg
306 KB View Download
font3.jpg
350 KB View Download
Project Member

Comment 5 by sheriffbot@chromium.org, Nov 9 2016

Labels: -Needs-Feedback Needs-Review
Owner: hdodda@chromium.org
Thank you for providing more feedback. Adding requester "hdodda@chromium.org" for another review and adding "Needs-Review" label for tracking.

For more details visit https://www.chromium.org/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot

Comment 6 by skobes@chromium.org, Nov 13 2016

Cc: -hdodda@chromium.org
Owner: e...@chromium.org
Status: Assigned (was: Unconfirmed)
@eae, who is the best owner for this?

FYI the URL for the third screenshot in #4 is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_Extended-B

At least on Linux, Firefox seems to do better than Chrome at finding glyphs for this block.

Comment 7 by e...@chromium.org, Feb 21 2017

Mergedinto: 245525
Status: Duplicate (was: Assigned)

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