Displaying non-Latin characters in Chromium

[James H. Markowitz]

I am running the most recent version of Chromium in my 14.2
system. When I visit a Wiki page for a person whose original name is
written in a script different from the Roman alphabet, the section of the
page where the name is written in the original script only displays blank
rectangles. I am not sure it happens for all scripts, but it sure does
for some South East Asian ones, among others.

What do I have to do to get Chromium to display such characters
under Slackware 14.2? I have come across recipes for other Linux
distributions, but nothing for Slackware.

[Rich]

Post by James H. Markowitz
I am running the most recent version of Chromium in my 14.2
system. When I visit a Wiki page for a person whose original name is
written in a script different from the Roman alphabet, the section of
the page where the name is written in the original script only
displays blank rectangles. I am not sure it happens for all scripts,
but it sure does for some South East Asian ones, among others.
What do I have to do to get Chromium to display such
characters under Slackware 14.2? I have come across recipes for
other Linux distributions, but nothing for Slackware.

Part of the answer here depends upon all of:

1) what character set the webserver of the wiki page states the page is
written in,

2) what character set the HTML within the page states it is written in,

3) what is /actually/ used as the raw bytes of the name in the HTML.

and, most importantly:

4) whether the font being used on your computer has actual character
glyphs corresponding to the bytes of the characters, assuming that all
of 1-3 above are correctly setup and used.

Without a url for any of us to look at, we are simply going to be
guessing, and likely guessing wrong.

[James H. Markowitz]

Post by Rich

Post by James H. Markowitz
I am running the most recent version of Chromium in my 14.2
system. When I visit a Wiki page for a person whose original name is
written in a script different from the Roman alphabet, the section of
the page where the name is written in the original script only displays
blank rectangles. I am not sure it happens for all scripts,
but it sure does for some South East Asian ones, among others.
What do I have to do to get Chromium to display such
characters under Slackware 14.2? I have come across recipes for other
Linux distributions, but nothing for Slackware.

1) what character set the webserver of the wiki page states the page is
written in,
2) what character set the HTML within the page states it is written in,
3) what is /actually/ used as the raw bytes of the name in the HTML.
4) whether the font being used on your computer has actual character
glyphs corresponding to the bytes of the characters, assuming that all
of 1-3 above are correctly setup and used.
Without a url for any of us to look at, we are simply going to be
guessing, and likely guessing wrong.

Any page that contains names in the Khmer script will do - e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuon_Chea.

[Rich]

Post by James H. Markowitz

Post by Rich

Post by James H. Markowitz
I am running the most recent version of Chromium in my 14.2
system. When I visit a Wiki page for a person whose original name is
written in a script different from the Roman alphabet, the section of
the page where the name is written in the original script only displays
blank rectangles. I am not sure it happens for all scripts,
but it sure does for some South East Asian ones, among others.
What do I have to do to get Chromium to display such
characters under Slackware 14.2? I have come across recipes for other
Linux distributions, but nothing for Slackware.

1) what character set the webserver of the wiki page states the page is
written in,
2) what character set the HTML within the page states it is written in,
3) what is /actually/ used as the raw bytes of the name in the HTML.
4) whether the font being used on your computer has actual character
glyphs corresponding to the bytes of the characters, assuming that all
of 1-3 above are correctly setup and used.
Without a url for any of us to look at, we are simply going to be
guessing, and likely guessing wrong.

Any page that contains names in the Khmer script will do - e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuon_Chea.

The page states that the character encoding is UTF-8 (in firefox) and
from what I can tell, with the DejaVu San's font as the default, I see
script glyphs that look like a non-english language (i.e., no "boxes").

I.e., above the individuals photo is Nuon Chea in english followed by a
second row of for glyphs that are, presumably, the native language
script.

So the server side looks to work properly. I'd suggest you look into
which font Chromium is utilizing for display, it may be picking a font
that does not contain glyphs for these characters. In which case,
telling it to use a different font (I recommend DejaVu Sans as it is
working for me) and see if things change.

[Eli the Bearded]

Post by Rich

Post by James H. Markowitz
Any page that contains names in the Khmer script will do - e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuon_Chea.

"Nuon Chea (Khmer: នួន ជា; born Lao Kim Lorn;[1] 7 July 1926 -- 4 August 2019)"

Post by Rich
The page states that the character encoding is UTF-8 (in firefox) and
from what I can tell, with the DejaVu San's font as the default, I see
script glyphs that look like a non-english language (i.e., no "boxes").

My system displays them in Firefox with the Khmer OS fonts:

http://www.khmeros.info/?q=en/fonts

There's a ZIP of the fonts to download there.

I just get boxes here in xterm. I think seeing boxes is typically a sign
of missing fonts. Seeing the question mark in a diamond character
(U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER) is a sign of bad encoding.

Elijah
------
looks more like a question mark in an oval in xterm

[a***@openbsd.home]

Post by James H. Markowitz
I am running the most recent version of Chromium in my 14.2
system. When I visit a Wiki page for a person whose original name is
written in a script different from the Roman alphabet, the section of the
page where the name is written in the original script only displays blank
rectangles. I am not sure it happens for all scripts, but it sure does
for some South East Asian ones, among others.
What do I have to do to get Chromium to display such characters
under Slackware 14.2? I have come across recipes for other Linux
distributions, but nothing for Slackware.

You can try installing noto-fonts from https://slackbuilds.org.

Here you have a link to the package:

https://pink-mist.github.io/sbotools/downloads/sbotools-2.7-noarch-1_SBo.tgz

You can use installpkg to install it, then with

sbosnap fetch && sboinstall noto-fonts

being run as root, you'll have these fonts installed.

sboinstall noto-emoji if you need those too, some people
abuse of them.

[James H. Markowitz]

Post by a***@openbsd.home

Post by James H. Markowitz
I am running the most recent version of Chromium in my 14.2
system. When I visit a Wiki page for a person whose original name is
written in a script different from the Roman alphabet, the section of
the page where the name is written in the original script only displays
blank rectangles. I am not sure it happens for all scripts, but it sure
does for some South East Asian ones, among others.
What do I have to do to get Chromium to display such characters
under Slackware 14.2? I have come across recipes for other Linux
distributions, but nothing for Slackware.

You can try installing noto-fonts from https://slackbuilds.org.
https://pink-mist.github.io/sbotools/downloads/sbotools-2.7-

noarch-1_SBo.tgz

Post by a***@openbsd.home
You can use installpkg to install it, then with
sbosnap fetch && sboinstall noto-fonts
being run as root, you'll have these fonts installed.
sboinstall noto-emoji if you need those too, some people abuse of them.

Thanks; installing those fonts did the trick. After doing so I
had to invoke fc-cache -f -v and then relaunch Chromium for the fonts to
be available. It might be the case that just relaunch Chromium is enough;
I don't know.