Chromium font support is seriously broken on Fedora 42. Same for others?

There are still a lot of 8-bit character encoded web pages out there (e.g. ISO-8859-15, Windows-1252, etc.) and for such web pages they often make use of the pi-encoded Symbol font to expand the visual glyph capabilities of the web page (e.g. add a Euro in ISO-8859-1).

Symbol is a commercial font so GNU/Linux distributions include the free URW clone:

user@host:~$ fc-match Symbol
StandardSymbolsPS.otf: "Standard Symbols PS" "Regular"

Chromium (and Brave Browser, etc.) however refuse to use fontconfig substitutions in Fedora 42, basically breaking much of the Internet for their users. Is that a Fedora specific bug or is it everywhere?

Code for simple test page, renders properly in FireFox in Fedora but not Chromium and clones:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1">
    <title>Testing Symbol font-family</title>
    <style type="text/css" title="Howdy">
span.sym { font-family: "Symbol", serif; }
span.urw { font-family: "Standard Symbols PS", serif; }
    </style>
  </head>
  <body>
  <p>Testing Symbol: <span class="sym">This is a test string.</span></p>
  <p>Testing Standard Symbols PS: <span class="urw">This is a test
     string.</span></p>
  </body>
</html>

Leave a Reply