Rendering of Arabic/Transliteration broken since upgrade to 29
Hello,
Mozilla Firefox 29.0.0 - 29.0.1, MacOS X 10.9.2 Problem: Arabic fonts (Lateef, Sheherazade) as well as transliteration Arabic > Latin is broken since update to 29. They were fine before. This happens when loading pages from a database. The protocol uses 'mixed content' and there seems to have been an update in Firefox's handling of such content. However, even explicitly unblocking such content doesn't solve the problem (apparently, one has to deblock every single page or is there an option for an entire domain? Otherwise, this is a pain in the neck and completely impractical). Firefox 'chooses' to select encoding seemingly at random: View > Character Encoding > Unicode/Western. Unfortunately, this version of Firefox scratched the possibility to select default encoding. Now, the pages loaded do not declare their encoding. However, this was not a problem because FF would use Unicode (UTF-8) by default. Setting instead "Default for Current Locale" is obviously useless. That's where the problem seems to be. Why was the plain default option changed so that we have no longer access to it? As you will understand in mixed environments (using a variety of languages and keyboard layouts), 'default locale' is pointless. Any suggestions are most welcome.
All Replies (6)
Clear the Cache
Firefox/Tools > Options > Advanced > Network > Cached Web Content: "Clear Now"
and
Remove Cookies
Firefox/Tools > Options > Privacy > Cookies: "Show Cookies"
If there is still a problem,
Start Firefox in Safe Mode
While you are in safe mode;
Firefox Options > Advanced > General.
Look for and turn off Use Hardware Acceleration.
Poke around safe web sites and see if there is still a problem. Then restart.
Can you post a link to some web pages with this issue that require no authentication or signing?
You can check for corrupted and duplicate fonts and other font issues:
- http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/multipleappsquit.html - Font Book 2.0 Help: Checking for damaged fonts
- http://www.creativetechs.com/iq/garbled_fonts_troubleshooting_guide.html
Note that Firefox uses the encoding send by the server if the server send an encoding.
See also:
- Firefox > Preferences > Content > Fonts & Colors > Advanced > Character Encoding for Legacy Content
FredMcD. Thank you for the hints. I'm sure they help in most cases. It didn't solve my problem though. Normal websites work actually quite well, it's just the internal ones that have this problem.
cor-el. Thank you also for your hints. I checked and I'm pretty sure that it's not a corrupt font. The problem, as I've mentioned, is that the server does not declare its encoding. This wasn't a problem as long as UFT-8 could be declared as fall-back. Now, as I've written, there is only the option 'Default for Current Locale' which doesn't help. I suppose either Mozilla puts back the older option or we have to do something here. Would love to post link but I'm not sure there is general access to our servers (probably not) but I'll ask.
I attached an exampled of how the 'garbled' text looks. It's more than garbled there just no font 'resolution'.
Thank you both again for taking the time to give advice. I think your hints will come in useful in general use of Firefox.
Modified by DKARSEM
Does that website use some custom font that maps on an 8-bit font and isn't Unicode?
Can you post a link to a publicly accessible page (i.e. no authentication or signing on required)?
Thank you for your reply. The font in question for Arabic is Lateef which is Unicode. However, other Unicode glyphs render garbled as well, although the browser is told to use e.g. Arial Unicode or the like, i.e. a Unicode font. But it seems because of lack of declaration, Firefox 'reverts' to ASCII. The Console gives the following warning: "The character encoding of the HTML document was not declared. The document will render with garbled text in some browser configurations if the document contains characters from outside the US-ASCII range. The character encoding of the page must be declared in the document or in the transfer protocol." I'll get in contact with our database person as of now, it's still "Would love to post link but I'm not sure there is general access to our servers (probably not) but I'll ask." (vide supra).
Can you post a link to a publicly accessible page (i.e. no authentication or signing on required)?