Re: mathml fonts in Firefox under Debian Linux 4.0 (etch)

William F. Hammond writes:

> On my Debian 4.0 (etch) (stable) platform the problem is fixed by
> commenting out lines 73 and 74 of the file fontEncoding.properties
> in the directory /usr/lib/iceweasel/res/fonts.  (This then makes
> the iceweasel's "res" tree match that of mozilla.com's firefox
> apart from two extra directories provided with iceweasel.)
>
> Thus,
> 73,74c73,74
> < encoding.symbol.ttf = Adobe-Symbol-Encoding
> < encoding.symbol.ftcmap = mac_roman
> ---
>> #encoding.symbol.ttf = Adobe-Symbol-Encoding
>> #encoding.symbol.ftcmap = mac_roman
>

That seems to be undoing a change that Debian have made.  It seems
that Debian are assuming that the Symbol font you have would be
Monotype's Symbol font (probably from a Windows distribution).
(I doubt they'd have a package for that font.)

> But I don't know if commenting out these lines is the definitive way
> to deal with the issue in Debian-stable.

It the right way to deal with it with your set of fonts but there
isn't a way that works for everyone (unless detection of the font
charmaps is done, or Symbol font is just not used).

>
> I think it's important for such distributions to work out of the box
> as much as possible ( for the moment that means assuming the user has
> followed the directions at
> http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/fonts/ ).
>
> How should this be reported to Debian?

It seems that the font you have for the Symbol family is Adobe's
Symbol font (usually from Acroread).  If Debian provided this for
you then I think they should correct their fontEncoding.properties
to match.  See this page for how to request that:

  http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting

However, if you installed Symbol yourself then Debian can't really
do anything to guess which encoding your Symbol font uses (without
making modifications to Mozilla).