Montserrat - Some special characters rendered incorrectly (font: WOFF or WOFF2) in OS older than iOS 17 about fonts HOT 13 OPEN

I am super curious as to whether BOTH the WOFF and WOFF2 versions have the same bad behavior.

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@stefmulas, could you please confirm which of the woff formats you are using? You could attach here a .zip file of the font

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Hi @stefmulas, thanks for your report. However, I've just tested this on iOS 17.2.1, and I can't replicate the issue; everything looks good.

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Hi @vv-monsalve,

Yes, as I said, there is no problem in devices with iOS 17 and newer. The problem is with older operative systems. Let me know if you can check with older OS. Thanks.

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I can see now that the issue you mentioned can be replicated on iOS 16 when checked with Browserstack. However, after reviewing both the TTF distributed font (download zip) and the Woff files provided through the font's repository, the € sign is working correctly. Thus, this appears to be a shaping issue related to iOS rather than a font bug.

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Interesting. I would be tempted to solely blame iOS, but if iOS did this with all WOFF and WOFF2 fonts prior to 2023, surely we would have heard more complaints.

Note: the MacRoman single-byte codepoint for the euro symbol is 0xdb, and the Unicode codepoint for the capital U with circumflex is U+00DB.

I see that when I do a ttx dump of Montserrat-Regular.woff2 from the original Montserrat repo that both cmaps (supposedly Unicode even) in that file map 0xdb to cap U with circumflex.

EDIT: Ignore this next comment, see further below
So my question is, how did the font bug get worked around by Apple?! 😛

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Well, I downloaded the fonts and tested them on Wakamai, and they worked well.
Now, after ttx it, I see

Which ttx command did you use?

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Gah, my bad. I mean, the Unicode is fine, there is no MacRoman cmap either.

The one small thing that confused me is that ttx leaves off the leading zeroes so somehow in my head that was a single-byte encoding I was looking at when I saw:
<map code="0xdb" name="Ucircumflex"/><!-- LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH CIRCUMFLEX -->

Certainly the coincidence of codepoints is somehow related to the bug, but I don’t see how it is Montserrat’s fault.

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What is strange, though, is that I only see <map code="0xdb" name="Ucircumflex"/><!-- LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH CIRCUMFLEX --> when I ttx the GF distributed VF. But not on the ttx for woff from the upstream repo.

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I ran ttx on the WOFF2 file from the upstream repo, that you linked. huh.

As you are well aware, U with cirumflex is a massively common character in fonts, so it is not like supporting it is unusual. Nearly every Google Font supports it. It is used in French as well as some more obscure places.

I keep on feeling like there is some big clue in all this, that we are just not quite figuring out. If there is nothing “wrong” with the font, I just want to understand why the bug would not affect nearly all fonts?

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Is it possible that the particular WOFF or WOFF2 the user has, has been subset to not have the euro?

Somebody else reported the exact same bug here, with an unspecified font, 3 years ago: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66109937/euro-sign-%E2%82%AC-is-rendered-as-%C3%9B-only-on-iphone

They concluded the euro was missing from their WOFF file, but rather than regenerating a better WOFF file, their solution was to not use WOFF.

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I ran ttx on the WOFF2 file from the upstream repo, that you linked. huh.

I first ran it only on woff, but not woff2. Below is the complete report for each format.

• Montserrat-VariableFont_wght.ttf
  (GF distributed version, zip download)

  <map code="0xdb" name="Ucircumflex"/><!-- LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH CIRCUMFLEX -->
  <map code="0x20ac" name="Euro"/><!-- EURO SIGN -->
  

• Montserrat-Regular.woff2
  (Designer's repository, under fonts/webfonts)

  <map code="0xdb" name="Ucircumflex"/><!-- LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH CIRCUMFLEX -->
  <map code="0x20ac" name="Euro"/><!-- EURO SIGN -->
  

• Montserrat-Regular.woff
  (Designer's repository, under fonts/webfonts)

  No Ucircumflex on the cmap table
  <map code="0x20ac" name="Euro"/><!-- EURO SIGN -->
  

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Hi @vv-monsalve, please find attached all fonts I'm using (woff and woff2).

woff fonts.zip

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