[webkit-dev] Buggy Font Selection in GTK Port

[Mike Hommey]

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 12:14:31PM +0200, Martin Sourada <martin.sourada at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Some of you might be aware of the problem with font selection in the GTK
> Port [1]. This is really pain in the ass especially on linux where we
> usually don't have any full-Unicode coverage and rely heavily on font
> fall-back rules. This is broken in WebKitGTK in a way that e.g. when you
> use latin-script locales (en_*, etc.) some foreign scripts like Kanji,
> Hiragana, Katakana, ... are not rendered (with pango backend they are
> just almost left out of the layout, with freetype backend black-bordered
> rectangle is displayed instead) when the glyphs are not in the font
> selected by WebKit for the page element, even though font used usually
> for substitution is present.
> 
> In the bug report it is stated, that the devs haven't come up a definite
> solution to that so I propose one (unfortunately I am not [yet] familiar
> with WebKit code and C++ [although I am fluent in C], but I'd like to
> help as much as possible). First the problem:
> 
> In web browser we face two issues with font selection. 
> 
> First is CSS font selection which is designed to select available font
> from the font list given in the CSS style - i.e. if you have in CSS
> font-family = Arial, "Liberation Sans", sans-serif and you have
> Liberation Sans but not Arial on your computer then Liberation Sans is
> selected.
> 
> Second is font substitution for missing glyphs. E.g. DejaVu Sans does
> not contain Japanese glyphs and thus is usually substituted by VLGothic
> when these glyphs are needed.
> 
> The first issue is already handled by WebKit and is AFAIK working
> correctly. The second issue is working correctly system-wide, but not in
> WebKit-gtk. Since the second issue is system wide the Pango library was
> designed to handle it and has pretty good algorithms to solve this
> problem - and thus it works good in most application. However,
> WebKit-gtk does not use these.

Theorically, there is no need for pango, there. Fontconfig already has
fallback possibilities.

Mike