09.23.07

Sane fonts, at long last

Posted in Camino at 6:04 pm by Smokey

It’s been a slow month so far in Camino-land, with the arrival of fall, the return of many of our student developers to campus, and all the adjustments those entail. However, it hasn’t been a period completely without progress.

Thursday Masayuki Nakano landed my patch for bug 299222 on the trunk, finally bringing sane font defaults for most langGroups (as Gecko refers to groups of languages and scripts). For years, setting the right fonts as the default font has been hampered by old, crufty font code from Mac OS 8.5 and assorted Carbon font bugs. (In fact, for some langGroups like Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Thai, we previously had to set the defaults to fonts that contained no glyphs for those languages(!) in order to make pages in those languages display properly. Talk about “hacking around bugs.” As you might imagine, this work-around caused no end of confusion for many users.)

With the new graphics (Cairo and Thebes) and text layout code using modern Mac OS X functions, and lots of font-wrangling work by Masayuki and others, it finally is possible to set sane font defaults for these langGroups and to provide default fonts for many languages spoken in India (whose scripts were not rendered properly prior to this). It took only two years and three months, but going forward Gecko-based applications should finally be useable on Mac OS X for users the world over, and I’m proud to have done a small part of the work to enable this great advance.

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