Wrong font used to display Cyrillic text

[RFW]

Binary package hint: firefox-3.0

Ubuntu 8.04.3, kernel 2.6.24-24-generic, Gnome 2.22.3, Firefox 3.0.12

webpage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Suvorov

html: <span lang="ru" xml:lang="ru">Алекса́ндр Васи́льевич Суво́ров,</span>

font: Verdana.ttf, modified 1998-11-12 07:18:40 (specified in Firefox preferences)

In the Infobox to the right, the Cyrillic text "Александр Васильевич Суворов" is displayed using the Verdana font, but in the body of the page it is displayed using what looks like a very poor version of Courier. It

This affects other Russian text on the same webpage, and I see it regularly on other webpages with Russian text. However, I note that oblique (="italic") Russian text on the same page is rendered correctly.

I have checked to be sure that Verdana renders correctly in Open Office Writer 2.4.1 and it does regardless of what style is used, regular, bold, italic, or bolditalic.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu Aug 6 11:31:22 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.04
Package: firefox-3.0 3.0.12+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.04.1
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
 LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: firefox-3.0
Uname: Linux 2.6.24-24-generic i686

[RFW (frogbarf)]

The same substitution turns out to be quite common on webpages in the less common languages. The easiest way of seeing this is to go to http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias and then click on various languages in the second column to get the language page in its own script. (If you click on the name in the first column, you get the English language page on that language.)

I see this kind of substitution in:

Lombardic: http://lmo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lengua_Lumbarda

Yoruba: http://yo.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%88d%C3%A8_Yor%C3%B9b%C3%A1

Nahuatl: http://nah.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C4%81huatlaht%C5%8Dlli

and so on.

It is probably important that this substitution rarely affects an entire page. It affects only some of the text in most instances, and you can have perfectly good text next to substituted text. On the Nahuatl page, the table that starts with

<table id="toc" class="toc" summary="Inīn tlahcuilōlco">

Most of the text is displayed as expected, but the text

# 5 Netlahtolmachtiloni

    * 5.1 Caquiztilizmatiliztli

is displayed using the crummy substitute even though each line in the table has the same HTML structure.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

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

RFW, do you still see the problem when using currently supported versions of Ubuntu and Firefox? Please let us know if you do otherwise this report can be left to expire in approximately 60 days time.

Thank you for helping make Ubuntu better.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for firefox (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]