bugGnash - The GNU Flash player - Bugs: bug #22926, Japanese font display

 
 

bug #22926: Japanese font display

Submitter:  Benjamin Wolsey <bwy>
Submitted:  Wed 16 Apr 2008 12:57:07 PM UTC
   
 
Category:  None Severity:  3 - Normal
Release:  None Status:  None
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  None
Open/Closed:  Open
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  Spam posted by anonymous
Sat 17 May 2008 03:49:22 PM UTC, comment #3: 

the formatting bug should be fixed now (not 100% accurately positioned but much better then before).
Japanese font thing still an issue ofc..

Sandro Santilli <strk>
Group Member
Sat 17 May 2008 10:23:59 AM UTC, comment #2: 

Attached hacked version for full offline testing.
(it was interesting to take a look due to an unrelated bug in TextField formatting..)

(file #15672)

Sandro Santilli <strk>
Group Member
Wed 16 Apr 2008 02:32:46 PM UTC, comment #1: 

The device font in question is _sans, not Arial (which isn't a 'legal' name for a device font, though the pp at least on Linux is quite happy with it).

I installed the fonts from http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/ (hosted on Savannah) and modified the SWF to look for FreeSans instead of _sans. Lo and behold, both Gnash and the pp then display Japanese characters!

So it looks like the answer to the problem here is (a) to install a font with enough characters and (b) to make sure fontconfig finds that one and not another.

(a) is tricky as freefont, which seems to be the most advanced free unicode font project, still has missing characters even in Japanese (and many character sets aren't implemented at all). I don't know that much about fonts, but FreeSans doesn't look all that attractive to me either. It's not a problem unique to Gnash, but it might be worth providing advice on installing fonts if a suitable source can be found.

(b) is the part relevant to Gnash. Not sure if fontconfig makes it possible to influence font matching criteria. I couldn't force it to load FreeSans at all.

Benjamin Wolsey <bwy>
Group Member
Wed 16 Apr 2008 12:57:07 PM UTC, original submission:  

This bug was reported on the mailing list, but it's an interesting one.

The following website contains a SWF movie that should load dynamic text in German, English and Japanese:

http://www.oddhammer.com/unicode/tutorial.htm
(http://www.oddhammer.com/unicode/unicode_tutorial.swf)

The two non-English texts start with a 3-byte unicode identifier that confuses Gnash (known bug). When this is removed, the German text displays but the Japanese one doesn't. On the mailing list it was reported that the Adobe player on the same system displays the Japanese text. The device font is specified as Arial.

On my system, Gnash loads the font LiberationSans-Regular.ttf, which contains glyphs for only a couple of thousand characters: no Japanese. Other applications (Abiword, OpenOffice.org) that use these fonts are also incapable of displaying the Japanese. The system font and web browsers seem able to do it.

However, the Adobe Player also fails on my system, which suggests there is no available scalable device font that contains Japanese glyphs. In that case, Gnash's behaviour is not a bug.

The fact that the PP and Gnash behave differently on another system suggests that a scalable unicode font is installed (e.g. the very-hard-to-find and proprietary Arial-Unicode-MS), which isn't selected by Gnash, but is by the PP. This might be a bug (selection of an inadequate font when an adequate one is available), but until I get hold of such a font I can't tell.

There appears to be no font containing anything like a majority of unicode characters under a free licence.

Benjamin Wolsey <bwy>
Group Member

 

(Note: upload size limit is set to 16384 kB, after insertion of the required escape characters.)

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Attached Files
file #15672:  unicode_tutorial.tgz added by strk (8KiB - application/x-compressed-tar)

 

Depends on the following items: None found

Items that depend on this one: None found

 

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  • -email is unavailable- added by strk (Updated the item)
  • -email is unavailable- added by bwy (Submitted the item)
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    Follows 1 latest change.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2008-05-17 strk Attached File- Added unicode_tutorial.tgz, #15672

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