Bolding unicode fonts works only sporadically

[Mark A. Hershberger]

While chasing down a bug today (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/32343) I discovered that Ubuntu's font support doesn't seem to work as well as Fedora 16's.

Attached you'll see a screenshot of Ubuntu's Chromium vs Ubuntu's Firefox. The bolded letters in the Tamil language font are not displayed correctly. I downloaded Google's .deb of Chrome to compare and it had the same problem. (You'll see from the linked bug that Brion diagnosed this problem first.)

Since Fedora 16 came out recently, I decided to give it a try. The Google-provided RPMs for Chrome were able to display the bolded fonts properly there.

Ubuntu should probably do whatever Fedora is doing to bold those fonts.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: chromium-browser 14.0.835.202~r103287-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-12.20-generic 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-12-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu4
Architecture: amd64
CrashDB: ubuntu
Date: Thu Nov 10 22:02:33 2011
Desktop-Session:
 DESKTOP_SESSION = gnome-shell
 XDG_CONFIG_DIRS = /etc/xdg/xdg-gnome-shell:/etc/xdg
 XDG_DATA_DIRS = /usr/share/gnome-shell:/usr/share/gnome:/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/
Env:
 MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH = None
 LD_LIBRARY_PATH = None
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release amd64 (20110427.1)
SourcePackage: chromium-browser
ThirdParty: True
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-10-23 (19 days ago)
chromium-default: CHROMIUM_FLAGS=""

[Santhosh Thottingal (santhosh-thottingal)]

Upstream bug - http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=32109- Font selected for complex scripts loses selected font attributes, sometimes making text (Italic, bold) render as empty boxes

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

Mark,

We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to review all reported bugs in a timely manner. You reported this bug some time ago and there have been many changes in Ubuntu and Firefox since that time.

Do you still see a problem related to the one that you reported? Please let us know if you do.

If we do not hear from you this bug report will close in approximately 60 days time.

Thank you for helping make Ubuntu better.

Paul White
[Ubuntu Bug Squad]

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

Upstream bug showing "Fixed" in November 2011
Bug did not expire due bug watch
No reply to comment #3 so closing as fixed