Re: UTF-8 support in Netscape 6.2

[ftang@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Yung-Fong Tang)]

Thanks for your comment. Please file a bug on bugzilla

shanjian and katakai: can you think about this issue. Thanks

Markus Kuhn wrote:

> > 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/>

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