[webkit-dev] Fonts for WebKit tests on OS X?

[Darin Adler]

I don’t think the size of the font files in the repository is a significant issue; are the sizes particularly huge compared to the total size of all the layout tests including expected results? If this was a problem, we could come up with some other way of having the test machinery download the fonts, but I think the complexity of that is not justified to solve a problem that may be a non-problem.

Aside from the size of the font files, it seems like we have at least three separate issues:

1) To make MathML work really well, platforms need to include appropriate fonts. As you said, this is not a WebKit decision, but a decision made by platform owners. If we want to advise them about the importance of this, it would be good to draft something explaining how we, the WebKit project, see this requirement and give advice on what to do. Someone should write a draft of this recommendation so we can put it somewhere on webkit.org, and also so we can discuss and make sure we agree on this advice. I’d like to see this written in the form of a recommendation so we can see if this is really a practical request. To give one example, “please use STIX Math, but version 2 which is not out yet” isn’t a great recommendation.

2) Since many people will be using WebKit on existing systems, it also seems important to design and to test what MathML does when these fonts are not present. It’s not enough to say “they should include the fonts”; we need to figure out what behavior we want, and test that the implementation does what we want. This means that we do *not* want to run all tests with these extra fonts. We need to test what will actually happen for users. I don’t think it’s right for the WebKit project to just take the stance, “it will look wrong when the fonts are not there”. Lets figure out what we are trying to do in that case. I could even imagine deciding something radical like deciding that the browser should not even expose the MathML elements if suitable fonts aren’t present.

3) For OS X and also iOS, we would like to test MathML with fonts that are currently not included with the OS; testing the “best case” version of MathML even if it’s not available in practice to OS X and iOS users at this time. The test runners for OS X and iOS already have code to activate fonts provided in font files for testing purposes. That’s done by the activateFonts function in ActivateFontsCocoa.mm, and the activateTestingFonts and activateFontsIOS functions in DumpRenderTree.mm. Currently this turns the fonts on unconditionally for all tests and so would get in the way (2) above. Note that there is also a mechanism alongside this called PLATFORM_FONT_LOOKUP, increases consistency of regression test results by blocking all fonts except for the ones on a whitelist, and so if the font is not listed in that whitelist it will be blocked.

— Darin