Firefox on fedora doesn't display certain characters correctly

dak · June 20, 2024, 10:53am

Hello,

Since Fedora 39 I start noticing that Firefox no longer renders certain characters correctly, instead I get the unicode number for the unsupported character.

Below is a screenshot of the page Firefox renders when accessing Unicode 2.0 test page

I initially thought it might be a problem with the encoding (currently using C.UTF-8) and tried to change it, but to no avail.
The same characters are displayed correctly in all other browsers (including lynx - text browser), which seems to indicate that this is not due to a missing font, but rather something specific to Firefox.

I wonder if anyone has encountered this problem or has any ideas on how to solve it?

fsflover · June 20, 2024, 3:18pm

Does it work on Fedora-40?

dak · June 20, 2024, 3:45pm

Nope, same problem. Tried both with a new fresh template and also did an in-place upgrade. Both result in the same behavior in Firefox.

leni1 · June 20, 2024, 4:46pm

I have a similar issue as well. On Wikipedia, foreign language characters don’t render at all (Japanese, Chinese, Farsi etc)

My hope is that it gets fixed in Qubes 4.3

Is there a way to swap the base OS template from fedora-39-xfce to fedora-40 or do you mean adding it on as another template in Qubes OS?

alimirjamali · June 20, 2024, 5:37pm

Related Github Issue #5937:

github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues

Korean characters not displayed in web browser

opened 02:04PM - 07 Jul 20 UTC

mfc

T: bug C: templates localization P: default diagnosed affects-4.1 affects-4.2

**Qubes OS version** R4.0 **Brief summary** FF, Chromium in Debian 10, FF i…n Fedora 32 all can display other non-latin languages like Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, etc. For some reason Korean isn't displayed. **To Reproduce** _Steps to reproduce the behavior:_ _1. Go to https://ko.wikipedia.org _2. See all the unicode boxes to compare, here is [Japanese wikipedia homepage](https://ja.wikipedia.org) and [Chinese wikipedia homepage](https://zh.wikipedia.org). **Expected behavior** Korean characters are also displayed. **Actual behavior** Korean characters are not displayed. **Relevant [documentation](https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/) you've consulted** https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/language-localization/ **Related, [non-duplicate](https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/reporting-bugs/#new-issues-should-not-be-duplicates-of-existing-issues) issues** https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/1059 https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/5914

Pay attention specifically to the latest comments. Marek’s pull request was opened last week.

For the meantime, you could install @fonts group in the template manually.

Read the information:

sudo dnf group info fonts

Compare my suggestion with Marek’s commit.
Finally install the fonts group

sudo dnf group install fonts

Or you could try that in a disposable AppVM 1st to see if it fixes your problem. Then do it.

dak · June 20, 2024, 5:54pm

That solved the problem, amazing @alimirjamali !
I never suspected it was related to missing fonts as it only affected Firefox and not other browsers using the same template.
After the group install of @fonts, everything renders as it should.

Thank you very much!