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About Me
- Name: Nigel Fernandes
- Location: Panjim, Goa, India
Crazy, dancing, programming, Goan.. I'm a computer geek and proud to be one. I program in Java, Ruby and .Net, PHP, Javascript. A lot of my recent work has been about CSS and UI design practices for large scale websites and Agile teams. I still while away hours dreaming up a web startup.
Unicode Rendering in Firefox is broken.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Its not often you get to complain about a bug in Firefox. Yes, of course there are quite a few, but in the course of general web programming you don't see them too often.But I stumbled over an absurd bug a few weeks back. (I procrastinate, hence this post is much delayed). When we tried to put some Devanagari (Hindi) text into an HTML page, it would render fine on IE 6 and 7 but come out broken on Firefox 1.5 and 2.x.
Whats the Unicode Bug in Firefox ?
If you put Unicode into an HTML page and it turns out broken in Firefox 1.5.x or Firefox 2.x , but looks fine in IE 6 or IE 7, chances are you've stumbled on to this bug.
Whats the cause?
Simple. You probably have a text-align:justify CSS style property set on the Unicode text in question. Its a weird bug, and the last place I expected to find the cause of my broken rendering issue was a simple CSS alignment property.
How to fix the Unicode Bug in Firefox?
Even simpler. Change the text-align property to any other valid value other than justify.
Is there a work around?
Nope. There isn't any. The Firefox team have been aware of this bug since Firefox 1.5, but haven't scheduled a fix till Firefox 3! Why? Well, the bug is actually resent in the core Gecko engine (so it is present in your XULRunner based Applications as well), and Firefox 2 was all about the UI fixes and clean up. So this fix got moved to Firefox 3. The good news is that Firefox 3 beta's are already here and looking good.
Is there really no work around?
Well, if you really can't change the way your site style is built, (to many users on IE to justify this change for example), or if you are not part of the sites developer team, then you can try out building a custom Grease Monkey script to fix the problem for the specific site. Be warned though, that this requires you to know JavaScript, and will require you to basically overwrite the CSS property for the site in question in your local browser.
Amit Chakradeo has tried this out.
Where can you read more?
Look up the original Firefox Bug Report:
Bug 240914 – "text-align: justify" ruins Unicode combining characters (e.g. Devanagari, Tamil, Bengali,Malayalam,Kannada)
Labels: Bengali, Devanagari, Firefox Font bug, Firefox Unicode Bug, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil
