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WebFont not supported for android < android 4
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Description

WebFonts did not work for me with the Android (2.3.6) default browser and in the Opera Mobile browser for android.

thanks
Nasir Khan Saikat
Wikimedia Bangladesh


Version: unspecified
Severity: normal

Details

Reference
bz33176

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 22 2014, 12:06 AM
bzimport set Reference to bz33176.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

Can you confirm whether this was on the mobile view or the non-mobile view, and which site with which fonts?

I visited the sites of the "Bengali wikipedia" in mobile view enabled and disabled mode but the extension was not working in any of the cases. As i know for the Bengali Wikipedia "Lohit Bengali" font is used in the Webfonts pack.

Created attachment 9715
Screenshot on Nexus 1, Android 2.3.6, Android stock browser - Lohit Bengali font

After waiting for WebFonts to load on the desktop view of http://bn.wikipedia.org/ I do see the fonts rendering, however I'm not sure they're correct. Closeups next...

Attached:

device-2011-12-15-125518.png (800×480 px, 160 KB)

Created attachment 9716
Closeup w/ Lohit font on Android 2.3.6 stock browser

Closeup of featured article section, screenshot from Android 2.3.6. I suspect this is rendered wrong -- the fonts show, but positioning of ligatures is different from what I see on the desktop.

Attached:

device-2011-12-15-125537.png (800×480 px, 108 KB)

Created attachment 9717
Closeup w/ Lohit font on Chrome 16, Mac OS X 10.7.2

Hopefully correctly rendered on current Chrome release on Mac OS X.

Attached:

chrome-desktop-osx.png (615×417 px, 110 KB)

Created attachment 9718
Screenshot on Nexus 1, Android 2.3.6, Android stock browser - the other font

This one shows as all boxes, just as the page does before webfonts loads with the Lohit font.

Attached:

device-2011-12-15-125502.png (800×480 px, 103 KB)

the Chrome Screenshot is ok. but in android the Lohit font show the characters in wrong order,we had to face similar problem for the wikipeida PDF rendering extension. though the font works properly form the desktop browsers. the other option on the list was to use the system font. you might not have any Bengali font in our phone that's why those boxes appears.

At the top banner it shows the boxes in all the modes. I think it might be the problem of the font itself. I had to face similar type of problem when i use the Lohit font in my linux pc. the font might not be able to show the Bold texts.

Android cannot render Indic complex scripts in any of the 3.x versions. They OS rendering engine is not capable of that(http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4153). Webfonts can solve the missing font issue, but if rendering engine is not capable of rendering, we wont get correct rendering.
But I heard that Android 4.0 with webfonts works well for Indic.

Created attachment 9725
Screenshot with Lohit font on Android 4 ICS emulator

Looks like this is indeed fixed in Android 4 -- rendering here seems to match the Chrome desktop rendering. Yay!

Unfortunately this means on older phones we've still got bad rendering and can't do much about it. :(

Attached:

Screenshot_at_2011-12-16_10:20:32.png (884×952 px, 273 KB)

Unfortunately there is nothing we can do here. It's a given. See comment 9.