Re: Determining font for a given Unicode codepoint

John,  would the use of fontconfig on Linux imply that a user could control
or optimise fallback fonts for Firefox?

Although one issue is the support of languages and scripts not supported by
system APIs. One of the tasks waiting in my to do list is to find a cross
browser,  cross platform solutions to displaying characters in envirnoments
that content could be in any language and the site/service has no language
tailoring,  eg Facebook,  Twitter, Google,  etc.

Its not a theoretical position, rather a practical one,  raised by minority
language speakers. When I Have spare time I will map behaviour across
platforms and browsers.

And interestingly having the Last Resort font installed on my Ubuntu box,
and using Firefox to access gmail tends to have interesting effects. Font
fallback mechanisms like to select the Last Resort font for some elements
in the GMail UI.

To the non-initiated font fall back can appear to be random or chaotic.

Andrew

On 07/03/2014 3:11 PM, "John Daggett" <jdaggett@mozilla.com> wrote:
>
>
> There isn't a single, all-inclusive fallback font for all Unicode
> characters. So user agents need to figure out how to dig up a font for
> a given character using whatever underlying platform font API is
> available (or not!).  In Firefox alone we use GDI or DirectWrite API's
> on Windows, CoreText on OSX and fontconfig on Linux. For system font
> fallback, Firefox first checks common default fonts for a given
> script, then it uses a list of common fallback fonts for each platform
> and then it tries to use a platform font API to lookup a font.  We put
> a lot of effort into making this as fast and efficient as possible, as
> do other browsers.
>