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

Karl Tomlinson wrote:
> 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).

Debian wouldn't include Adobe's Symbol font because it isn't Free; but 
there is URW's clone, StandardSymL, that is GPL'd and included with 
Ghostscript and TeX.