Noto means "no tofu": fixing dotted circles in Myanmar text
2 days ago
- A customer reported S'gaw Karen text rendering dotted circles in Firefox, caused by font handling issues for rare scripts.
- Instead of fixing just one language, the team fixed the issue for 43 scripts by using Google's Noto fonts as fallback in the CMS.
- The fix uses CSS @font-face with unicode-range to load Noto fonts only when needed, covering scripts like Myanmar, Georgian, Khmer, etc.
- Language, script, and locale are distinct concepts; script-related bugs are often mistaken for language bugs.
- Noto fonts are open source, designed to eliminate 'tofu' (empty boxes), and cover hundreds of scripts with one font per script.
- The improvement only applies to the CMS editor; frontend developers still need to handle font fallbacks on their own.