Unable to render combining accent with some characters

[Graeme Hewson]

In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_%28linguistics%29 the following strings occur:

«земли́ (genitive of "earth, land") vs. зе́мли (plural of "earth, land") in Russian»
«In Russian and Ukrainian dictionaries, stress is indicated with an acute accent (´) on a syllable's vowel (example: вимовля́ння)»

In all the native KDE applications I've tried (Konqueror with KHTML or WebKit, Rekonq, Konsole and Kate) and using Ubuntu or Liberation fonts, these combining acute accents display as empty rectangles.

This occurs only with Kubuntu; GNOME Terminal in Ubuntu displays the accents correctly.

I've reported the problem to KDE in https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=315642 with an attached example HTML file and a screenshot.

[Graeme Hewson (ghewson)]

Created attachment 77513
Example HTML file

In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_%28linguistics%29 the following strings occur:

«земли́ (genitive of "earth, land") vs. зе́мли (plural of "earth, land") in Russian»
«In Russian and Ukrainian dictionaries, stress is indicated with an acute accent (´) on a syllable's vowel (example: вимовля́ння)»

In all the native KDE applications I've tried (Konqueror with KHTML or WebKit, Rekonq, Konsole and Kate) and using Ubuntu or Liberation fonts, these combining acute accents display as empty rectangles.

This occurs in KDE 4.9 and 4.10. Other fonts render OK. Firefox displays the characters OK using these, and other, fonts.

Experimenting, I've found some other examples which do and don't render correctly. For instance, with some Greek letters the accent renders correctly, but with other Greek letters it doesn't.

I'll attach a small example HTML file and a screenshot of it from Rekonq.

[Graeme Hewson (ghewson)]

Created attachment 77514
Screenshot from Rekonq

[Christoph-maxiom (christoph-maxiom)]

Could you add a link to the html file from comment #1? The wikipedia page link from comment #0 renders correctly on my system (Konqueror/KHTML 4.10.60).

[Graeme Hewson (ghewson)]

(In reply to comment #2)

The HTML file is linked below in the attachments.

[Graeme Hewson (ghewson)]

Tracking report in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-font-family/+bug/1131890

[Christoph-maxiom (christoph-maxiom)]

Oh, right, I missed it. Looks correct here.

[Graeme Hewson (ghewson)]

What distro are you using? I'll see about reproducing the problem on my box.

[Graeme Hewson (ghewson)]

I've reproduced the problem on two boxes with OpenSUSE 12.2 with KDE 4.10 installed. I tested with Liberation fonts, Konqueror and Konsole, as Ubuntu fonts, Rekonq and Kate weren't installed by default.

The problem was present in Konqueror with both KHTML and WebKit under KDE 4.10. However, testing before then with the live OpenSUSE 12.2 CD and KDE 4.8.4, the problem was present only with KHTML. The same was true after installing OpenSUSE and applying all updates, taking KDE to 4.8.5.

[Graeme (graeme-redhat-bugs)]

In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_%28linguistics%29 the following strings occur:

«земли́ (genitive of "earth, land") vs. зе́мли (plural of "earth, land") in Russian»
«In Russian and Ukrainian dictionaries, stress is indicated with an acute accent (´) on a syllable's vowel (example: вимовля́ння)»

In all the native KDE/Qt applications I've tried, these combining acute accents display as empty rectangles. The problem only occurs with Liberation and Ubuntu fonts, and it doesn't occur with GTK-based applications such as Firefox when run on the same KDE platform. (I haven't tested Ubuntu fonts with Fedora as they're not installed by default.) It seems there's some combination of problems with these fonts and with KDE or Qt.

To reproduce the problem in Konqueror, display the above Wikipedia article then go to Settings / Configure Konqueror menu, then under Web Browsing, Appearance entry, Fonts tab. For Sans serif font, select Liberation (note the default is DejaVu); click OK or Apply. To reproduce while displaying bugzilla.redhat.com (e.g., this bug report!), change Fixed font instead.

I've created a small HTML file here: http://bugsfiles.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=77513 which demonstrates the problem (not confined to Cyrillic characters), and also shows a couple of characters which display correctly. Change the Standard font in Konqueror to demonstrate the problem.

To reproduce the problem in Konsole, download the file and cat it. Go to Settings/Edit Current Profile, Appearance tab and click Select Font. Note it's not necessary to click Apply or OK after selecting the font; all instances of Konsole update their font dynamically as you select it.

I've reported the problem against KDE and Ubuntu fonts here:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=315642
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-font-family/+bug/1131890

[Graeme Hewson (ghewson)]

Reported against Liberation fonts at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=952778

[Nicolas (nicolas-redhat-bugs)]

While this is a problem that should be fixed, stress is by and large not indicated in written Russian/Ukrainian. The only books where it is explicitly stated are dictionaries and teaching materials for western students (for native speakers it is so natural it does not need indication).

So working diacritics on Cyrillic letters has about the same priority as working phonetic notation in Latin text.

[Pravin (pravin-redhat-bugs)]

Though i can add some of these stress marks in Liberation fonts. But root problem is from qt.

Qt is not able to select characters from fallback fonts when selected fonts does not have these characters.

This should be fixed in qt.

[Pravin-d-s (pravin-d-s)]

This is not font bug bug rather QT bug.

If selected font does not contains some characters rendering engine should render it by fallback fonts. look AT GTK how it handles it.

For quick reproduce

simply paste "земли́" in kwrite and apply liberation sans. Check same with gedit and observe the difference.

[Denis (denis-redhat-bugs)]

(In reply to Nicolas Mailhot from comment #1)
> While this is a problem that should be fixed, stress is by and large not
> indicated in written Russian/Ukrainian. The only books where it is
> explicitly stated are dictionaries and teaching materials for western
> students (for native speakers it is so natural it does not need indication).
>
> So working diacritics on Cyrillic letters has about the same priority as
> working phonetic notation in Latin text.

The Russian and Ukrainian and other Slavic language Wikipedias use the stress marks in a lot of articles on the first occurrence of an entry word.

[Nicolas (nicolas-redhat-bugs)]

(In reply to Denis Jacquerye from comment #3)
> (In reply to Nicolas Mailhot from comment #1)
> > While this is a problem that should be fixed, stress is by and large not
> > indicated in written Russian/Ukrainian. The only books where it is
> > explicitly stated are dictionaries and teaching materials for western
> > students (for native speakers it is so natural it does not need indication).
> >
> > So working diacritics on Cyrillic letters has about the same priority as
> > working phonetic notation in Latin text.
>
> The Russian and Ukrainian and other Slavic language Wikipedias use the
> stress marks in a lot of articles on the first occurrence of an entry word.

Right, they are giving the phonetics like a dictionnary

[Graeme Hewson (ghewson)]

Problem has been reported against Qt in https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-32470 (reproducible in Qt 4.8.4; fixed in 5.0.0). Closing KDE bug.

[Graeme (graeme-redhat-bugs)]

This was reported against Qt: https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-32470, and is apparently fixed in Qt 5.0.

If Qt 5.0 renders the characters the same way as GTK does currently, then I guess that's good enough (though obviously having the accent to the side on the capital letters and on ё isn't typographically ideal).

а́ е́ ё́ и́ о́ у́ ы́ э́ ю́ я́
А́ Е́ Ё́ И́ О́ У́ Ы́ Э́ Ю́ Я́

Is there any reason to keep this bug open?

[Pravin (pravin-redhat-bugs)]

Closing. Do reopen if any more issue with this.

[Graeme Hewson (ghewson)]

Workaround in Qt 5. See https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-13206.

[Graeme Hewson (ghewson)]

Not really "invalid", but closing due to lack of interest and workaround available.

[Kevin (kevin-redhat-bugs)]

> Is there any reason to keep this bug open?

Qt 4 is going to stay around for a long time to come. We still ship qt3 and a handful applications still use it.

[Pravin (pravin-redhat-bugs)]

Even though i am bit reluctant to add new shapes to Liberation 1.07 since we do have Liberation 2.0 which has much broader coverage than Liberation 1.07.

But as you might be knowing due to hinting compatibilities we are not packaging liberation 2.0 into Fedora.

I am just thinking for some alternatives so that, users preferring character coverage rather than fine hinting output will able to use liberation fonts 2.0

[Red (red-redhat-bugs)]

Removing external tracker bug with the id '32470' as it is not valid for this tracker