Bug? "Hyphen" character rendered in place of "soft hyphen" in most browsers except Safari and Opera

Dear www-font list members,

My colleague type designer Lukasz Dziedzic and myself discovered today a
rather irritating problem. It appears that the major web browsers
(Firefox, Chrome, IE) do not correctly render the "soft hyphen"
character when hyphenation is used. When soft hyphens (­ or U+00AD)
is inserted into the HTML code, those browsers incorrectly render the
font's "hyphen" character (U+002D) in the place of the soft hyphens,
instead of rendering the font's "soft hyphen" character (U+00AD).

This has not been obviously visible so far because in most fonts, the
glyphs for U+00AD and U+002D are identical, or the fonts have used the
same glyph for both codepoints. However, we've made a test font in which
the glyphs for these characters are visibly different, and discovered
that Firefox, Chrome and IE misbehave. Safari and (to some extent) Opera
perform correctly, on the other hand.

We've documented the case extensively, along with the sample font and
the screenshots, and additional explanations. Please kindly take a look at:
http://www.twardoch.com/webfonts/2011-07-softhyphenbug/softhyphenbug.html

I don't know what the best way is to report the bugs to three different
browser vendors (Mozilla, Google and Microsoft), so I thought this list
might be the best place to post this information. Please kindly take it
up and forward the problem to the appropriate channels within each
browser vendor.

Best,
Adam

-- 

May success attend your efforts,
-- Adam Twardoch
(Remove "list." from e-mail address to contact me directly.)

Received on Saturday, 9 July 2011 16:22:09 UTC