Diaeresis Issue on Firefox about source-sans HOT 18 CLOSED

Can you make that HTML page available somewhere on-line so we can look at its source, test with other browsers and see which font files are being used?

from source-sans.

Sure, forgot about that. It’s at http://kairo.fi/bucket/sourcesansfirefox/firefox.html

from source-sans.

@LariElovainio Works for me.

Chromium 28.0.1500.20
Linux Kernel 3.9.4
Freetype 2.4.11

from source-sans.

@GBeauregard Like I said, on Firefox.

from source-sans.

Here is a discussion that might be related: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=404848

from source-sans.

I made some tests and came to the conclusion that this is not a bug in the fonts that we provide. All of the fonts referenced in you stylesheet are files generated by Font Squirrel. If you change your CSS to make it use our TrueType files you'll see that the text renders properly in Firefox.

If you don't want to serve our TrueType fonts yourself, try using one of the webfont services that distributes Source Sans such as Typekit or Google Web Fonts.

from source-sans.

I think the same issue was with Google hosted files on Windows. I haven’t seen that myself yet, though. I changed to self hosted to see if it would help. But anyway, this is hardly the most critical issue, just thought to report.

from source-sans.

@LariElovainio I assumed you were asserting this was related to the font itself by filing a bug for the font itself. Instead, it appears you are asserting it's a problem with the web browser, in which case it is odd you filed a bug report with the font.

from source-sans.

@GBeauregard Well, other fonts seem to manage the situation better. That was my reasoning.

from source-sans.

@LariElovainio yes but they're certainly not fonts that were generated with Font Squirrel.

What's happening is that several of the ã and õ characters in your HTML file are encoded as a base letter plus a combining mark, rather than a single character. There's nothing wrong with this since, according to the Unicode standard, the character ä (U+00E4) is canonically equivalent to the sequence of characters a (U+0061) and ◌̈ (U+0308). But in order to display the combining diaeresis neatly above the base letters, the font needs to have some extra data (and the application rendering the text needs to enable it).

The Source Sans Pro fonts DO HAVE this extra data but it often gets stripped during font format conversions.

from source-sans.

Okay, I’ll try to investigate the issue our client was having on Windows with the non converted fonts.

from source-sans.

Still, I don’t understand if the required data is stripped, why is only Firefox having problems?

from source-sans.

Safari has the problem too. My guess is that Chrome is using the precomposed character (U+00E4) as fallback. If that character were not in the font Chrome would likely render the same way as Firefox.

from source-sans.

I made some test documents to verify this hypothesis. What I did was replace all a characters in the text by m characters. Chrome did not render things exactly like Firefox, but it did do fallback; notice that the m with the diaeresis on top has serifs.

The test files are available at http://adhesiontext.com/issue_28/

Chrome

Firefox

from source-sans.

I still don’t see this issue in Safari (6.0.4), though.

I’ll meet the client today, so I can have a look on what’s going on.

from source-sans.

I'm still on OS X 10.6.x. The Safari version I tested on was 5.1.9.

from source-sans.

And for the sake of completeness, the other browsers' versions were:
Chrome 27.0.1453.93
Firefox 20.0

from source-sans.

I think this can be closed, most computers at the client’s office show the text just fine. I haven’t gotten down to any specific configuration (OS, browser) that breaks with the Google hosted fonts consistently.

from source-sans.