Comments on: Firefox 3: Fonts and text

By: Farrukh

Farrukh — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:05:37 +0000

Hi
I'm working with Urdu language and now using an Urdu font, known as Alvi Nastaliq,
http://www.urdushare.net/alvi/Alvi_Nastaleeq_1_...

which is perfect in Internet Explorer, but not in FireFox 3.01, I mean there are some minor issues like placement of words disturbs in FF, like if you apply font to this Urdu text:
میرا نام فرخ ہے اور میرا تعلق پاکستان سے ہے
then some words might be placed below or mixed, but this is not the case in IE.

If you have Alvi Nastaliq, then you can see this forum
http://www.alqlm.org which is purely in Urdu, but you can see the misplacement of words in FF but not in IE

By: Jack Yan

Jack Yan — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:23:53 +0000

I have waited a long time to see these features and they were discussed in the font industry almost a decade ago. Firefox has taken four years to display ligatures and speech marks in the same typeface as the rest of the text—but I am glad it has finally made amends and, in fact, headed even further out in front with kerning and discretionary ligature support. I have found it, so far, to be inconsistent but at least it is occasionally working—so I take my hat off to the developers for caring about typography for a change.

By: Kabonfootprint

Kabonfootprint — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:42:17 +0000

I'm using Firefox 3 and some of the fonts are looking good but some have issues.
I'll have to loog where the problem comes from.

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 01:08:27 +0000

Firefox 3's new features indeed are breath-taking.

I surely would upgrade from version 2 if it wasn't for the incompatibility with the Babylon dictionary software (babylon scanning for words is simply inaccurate and is impossible to use it with Firefox).

Would people please report this "bug" to the Mozilla developers because I'm doing that already.

Thanks.

By: shokk

shokk — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 05:44:04 +0000

Lack of “text-overflow: ellipsis” broke part of my app going from FF2 to FF3. When is this coming back?

By: Alan CHENG

Alan CHENG — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 06:53:13 +0000

Recently, I encountered a problem with Firefox 3 font selection behavior. I found that firefox 3 cannot automatically fallback to the correct fonts to show some characters in the unicode private use area. However, if I specified the correct font in options/preferences, these characters can be showed correctly.

If you want to test, go to this page:
http://zh.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Unicode_F000-FFFF

On my fx3, it looks like this:
http://img528.imageshack.us/my.php?image=puafx3normalbr8.png

If I use chinese font “AR PL New Sung” to display, it looks like this:
http://img147.imageshack.us/my.php?image=puafx3witharplnewsungspty2.png

You can get AR PL New Sung here:
ftp://ftp.opendesktop.org.tw/odp/ODOFonts/OpenFonts/

This font selection problem seems to exist only on Windows. It works reliably on Debian.

By: Robert

Robert — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 06:39:57 +0000

Since I think I installed FF3, I’ve noticed that lots of characters now are being drawn as well, dominoes. I apologize since this is offtopic, but do you know what’s causing that?

By: Mark Seymour

Mark Seymour — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:08:29 +0000

I have noticed that kerning for Helvetica (including Swis721) seems to have problems still in Firefox 3 for Windows. I am assuming this is because of ClearType, right?

By: Stephen

Stephen — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:47:02 +0000

The font handling is beautiful…except I’m having a problem with Japanese fonts on a particular page that nobody else seems to have. In Firefox 2, the Japanese fonts render beautifully, whereas in Firefox 3, it changes to an ugly, nearly unreadable block font. Has anyoen seen this? I’m going to try FF3 again, and if the font problem continues, I will open up a support request on the Mozilla forums.

By: Michael van Ouwerkerk

Michael van Ouwerkerk — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 14:15:19 +0000

I second Joeri’s request for “text-overflow: ellipsis” support.

Additionally “word-wrap: break-word” would be great for when I have little control over the content being displayed, making the soft hyphen and the wbr tag hard to use. Rendering such content in a container with “word-wrap: break-word” can really stop a layout from falling apart. This matters 10 times more when rendering on mobile phones with 240×320 screens :-)

So please? These are really more important than text shadows, however pretty they may look.

By: Neorelay

Neorelay — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 11:33:36 +0000

I do agree with the earlier statement that ligatures is not possible in arabic unless u can find the position of letter in a word and offcourse the context of the word changes sometimes even with ligatures. But anyhow we really appreciate you guyz for your hard work to bring the best out of to the users.. keep rocking…

By: Seamus

Seamus — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 16:40:25 +0000

How does Firefox determine which characters to swap with a ligature? Does it ask the font what characters to swap or does it just look for fi and fl?

Also, what about the other features of OpenType such as swash, small-cap glyphs, etc?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms745109.aspx#variants
http://www.typotheque.com/fonts/opentype_features/

All the same, very cool.

By: Rainer

Rainer — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 07:24:16 +0000

Imho one of the most useful extensions in the web-font business would be a “public download” mechanism. That would free us from speculating if a font is installed on my visitors browser or if not (for what we must use sIPHR currently).
But I am pretty sure, that this will lead to copyright problems…

By: Adam

Adam — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:09:47 +0000

I’m curious, does IE7 or IE8 beta do any of this?

By: Thomas Phinney

Thomas Phinney — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:04:49 +0000

Just two clarifications:

For font types, “Type 1″ and “PostScript” are synonyms. More specifically, PostScript refers to a whole pile of different font types, but when people talk about “PostScript fonts” they almost always mean “Type 1 fonts.”

“While ligatures aren’t used that often in English….”

Urm, maybe not by you, but serious publishing/graphics applications use ligatures all the time.

The basic fi and fl ligatures have been present in almost every font Adobe has made since Adobe first did fonts in the mid-80s. They are part of the basic MacRoman character set. Their automatic usage has been supported by applications going back to QuarkXpress 3 and InDesign 1. Today they’re present in >95% of OpenType fonts, and work automatically in applications including InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, QuarkXPress, Pages, Keynote, TextEdit….

Cheers,

By: Stan James

Stan James — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:41:45 +0000

Are there any plans for dynamic fonts? I am pretty tired of seeing the same five fonts for the last decade. There are so many public domain fonts now, and a 40K font download is nothing with broadband today.

Safari now supports the @font-face rule for TrueType. Hopefully Firefox isn’t far behind? A more beautiful web awaits!

By: Ralf Herrmann

Ralf Herrmann — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:25:49 +0000

>>>There are a number of different types of fonts,
>>>the most common of which are OpenType, TrueType, Type 1, Postscript, and bitmap.

OpenType is a superset of TrueType, so these are basically the same thing.
PostScript is not a font format at all. Type1 is.
Bitmap is also not a font format, but a way to build fonts – in comparison to “outline fonts” such as TrueType/OpenType and Type1.

By: Damjan

Damjan — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:37:55 +0000

BTW is there some HTML example page we could use to exactly see how Firefox performs?

By: Damjan

Damjan — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:31:09 +0000

Hi, I’d like you to comment on the support for the OpenType locale feature. This is very important for the Macedonian language for ex. since there’s a different rendering of the serif italic letters in the russian and macedonian cyrillic. The DejaVu fonts have a MKD locale with the corect glyphs, and all Pango applications use those glyphs in a MKD locale. But Firefox3 doesn’t do this.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24139

By: Lebanese Blog

Lebanese Blog — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:52:11 +0000

I don’t think glyphs would transcode for Ascii.

By: AzizMostafa

AzizMostafa — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 12:54:07 +0000

Very Interesting+Informative
Further sample on arabic-ligatures, just have a look at:
http://typophile.com/node/19609
Thanks with Flowers

By: Joeri

Joeri — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 05:34:12 +0000

This is all really nice, I have to admit, but the single text feature firefox needs most for my purposes is text-overflow: ellipsis. I have web apps where there are numeric columns in a fixed layout grid containing currencies and areas. You can imagine if numbers get cut off right between two digits how this becomes a usability issue.

By: Snowboard Australia

Snowboard Australia — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 03:25:43 +0000

Nice article there… FF3 is definintely the best browser I have ever used, hands down…

By: Dave G

Dave G — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 02:54:59 +0000

@Greg

Yes I now realise I need some new glaſses.

By: John Daggett

John Daggett — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:44:58 +0000

@Brent:

Neither Georgia or Verdana have the necessary ligature information in the font (in a GSUB table on Windows, a mort/morx table on OS X). Zapfino probably only has ligature information for OS X. I see the glyph you’re talking about but we need to access this via OpenType information. Sadly, this is the case for a lot of fonts under XP. The situation is better under Vista, fonts like Calibri, Candara, Constantia, Corbel all have ligature information.

I set up a test page that renders text samples with and without ligatures for all the fonts on your system. It uses a privileged API to access the list of fonts on the system so you’ll need to download this and run it locally.

http://people.mozilla.com/~jdaggett/ligaturetestallfonts.html

If you’re especially curious you can dig through font info manually with a tool like ttx, a Python tool that allow you to dump TrueType/OpenType fonts into XML. For example:

ttx -t GSUB calibri.ttf

This will dump out the contents of the GSUB table to an XML file and you can browse the contents to figure out what ligatures are available.

@web design company:

The Webkit folks disable kerning/ligatures for performance reasons:

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6136

By: Matt Sayler

Matt Sayler — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:20:53 +0000

you should do a version of this article with the raw text so those of us running RCs can see it in action.

By: Greg

Greg — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:49:03 +0000

@Dave G:

That’s not an f, that’s a ſ (long s). But yes, ß is properly a ligature of ſ and z, not ſ and s. No one uses the long s anymore, so it’s always confusing when Thomas Jefferson wrote about “life, liberty and the purſoot of happineſs.”

By: John thomas

John thomas — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:10:00 +0000

FireFox 3 totally ROCKS! Wow hands down their best one yet.

JT
http://www.Privacy-center.net

By: Dave G

Dave G — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:37:52 +0000

ß is not a ligature of f and s, it is a ligature of s and z. It was introduced in German blackletter typography. Also, Arabic letters change shape depending upon their position in a word. This is not the same as a ligature and in fact contradicts your earlier statement. A ligature is when a letter changes shape when it is in combination with other specific letters. Ligatures do exist in Arabic, such as lam-alif.

By: web design company

web design company — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:33:51 +0000

WebKit does not do this by the way. Enter “ffffff” into a text box in both WebKit and Firefox and increase the font size a lot to see how Firefox renders the string in pairs of ‘f’s. Also, not programming.