Google-chrome – Displaying Unicode on Chrome vs Firefox

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Unicode Rendering: Firefox vs Chrome

OS: Windows XP SP3

My question is about the rendering of this post on Firefox vs Chrome. I can see a lot of boxes on Chrome, not so much on Firefox.

Firefox:

firefox

Chrome:

chrome

What do I do?

Update:

firefox and chrome settings

Update 2

Changed Sans Serif fonts on Chrome to Arial Unicode and restarted

Chrome fonts

Update 3

This is inspired by @Arjan's references

The smilies on Firefox(The reference smilies are the ones below)

the smilies on firefox

The smilies on Chrome(The reference smilies are the ones below)

the smilies on chrome

Update:

The source of the above post is displayed as below

Firefox

firefox source

Chrome

source on chrome

Best Answer

There is more to it, including operating system used.

My Chrome rendering of that post looks similar to your firefox image.

Simply put, it is a mixture of ANSI/Unicode characters and encoding techniques. Different browsers (and operating systems) treat and render it differently.

re: comment...

I am running Windows 7 - Windows Vista and Windows 7 handle ANSI/Unicode and international rendering much better. If you go to international/region options in control panel (of XP), you should be able to install additional support for complex languages.

alt text

(from http://www.mehramedia.com/)

This simply means to me that Firefox uses its own rendering engine for everywhere, where as Chrome relies on the operating systems support.

Related Solutions

Firefox Fonts – How to Get Firefox to Use MS TrueType Fonts on Linux

Edit: I completely updated this answer after getting some breakthrough advice from a colleague.

Here's what I inserted in /etc/fonts/local.conf (inside the <fontconfig> element):

<!-- Replace Helvetica with Arial -->
<match target="pattern">
    <test qual="any" name="family">
        <string>Helvetica</string>
    </test>
    <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="strong">
        <string>Arial</string>
    </edit>
</match>

Similarly for Times -> Times New Roman. (See my full local.conf here.) The key was to use binding="strong" for the <edit> element. (Also, using "assign_replace" mode instead of "assign" causes something similar, except that then it's too aggressive: also Verdana gets replaced with Arial).

Changes in font configurations are effective immediately. Besides testing in Firefox, you can check that it works like this:

$ fc-match helvetica
Arial.ttf: "Arial" "Normal"

If you run into problems, the best help is near: man fonts-conf. (Although even with the documentation, the workings of the font system seemed somewhat complicated or unwieldy to me.) You can also try to "debug" what's really going on using a command like:

FC_DEBUG=4 fc-match helvetica

In addition, FC_DEBUG=1024 fc-match helvetica shows the list of config files that affect the font matching.

Good Font for Unicode Symbols

Here that range is mostly filled by Deja Vu Sans, STIXGeneral, VL Gothic, UnDotum, and... "MiscFixed", whatever that is (in the OCR section). Only holes at U+244A, U+24EB through U+24FF, U+269D, U+26BA through U+26BC, U+26C0 through U+26C3, and U+27CA remain.

Unicode Rendering: Firefox vs Chrome

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Firefox Fonts – How to Get Firefox to Use MS TrueType Fonts on Linux

Good Font for Unicode Symbols

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