Re: UTF-8 support in Netscape 6.2

[Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> How good is Netscape 6.2 for Linux with regard to UTF-8 ?

Somewhat better than Netscape 4, but not perfect. It uses now for UTF-8
pages the same normal font sizes that it uses for ISO 8859-1 pages,
therefore UTF-8 pages such as

  http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/utf8.html
  http://www.kernel.org/
  http://www.unicode.org/

are not shown any more in the ugly and huge single Unicode font size
that Netscape 4 used.

Unfortunately, Netscape 6.2 still picks for instance the Cyrillic fonts from
(probably) JIS X 0208 encoded EastAsian fonts, which have square
(double-width) glyph spacing designed for ideographs, therefore Russian
UTF-8 text looks still pretty ugly by default. This is particularly
silly, because Netscape obviously does open installed KOI8-R fonts in
order to get suitably sized box drawing characters.

Disappointing is also that it mixes glyphs from different font sizes
where a monospaced font is used, even if suitable monostaced
-misc-fixed-iso10646-1 fonts are installed, as you can see for example
on fixed-width plain-text test pages such as

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/TeX.txt
  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/wgl4.txt

I have not been able to fix this myself. I tried going to
Preferences|Fonts|Unicode|Monospace and selected there the offered
"misc-fixed-iso10646", but nothing changed.

I understand if Netscape doesn't use ISO10646-1 fonts everywhere by
default (due to the unfortunately huge XFontStruct allocations that they
cause), but I don't understand why explicitly selecting a single
"misc-fixed-iso10646" size doesn't work. Looks like a bug to me.

Summary: With Netscape 6.2, the ugly UTF-8 fonts used by Netscape 4 are
now no longer a reason for web page authors to avoid the UTF-8 encoding.
On the other side, I have failed to use proper ISO10646-1 fonts and as a
result, UTF-8 test pages with content bejond Latin-1 still do not look
as good as they could easily.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

--
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/