Arabic text is not showing properly in Kmeleon
example: http://www.gawaher.com/pages/t/78/
letters are ovelapping over each others, and many dotted circles appear instead of some letters.
the same page displays correctly in IE, FF and chrome.

I can see the website identical in Firefox 2.0.0.21 and K-Meleon 1.5.3.

K-Meleon in Spanish

My question is: why does the surat/text show properly in some browsers?

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.gawaher.com/pages/t/78/

While You cannot get rid of these errors there might be 1 that You can try to evade.

Try with charset=windows-1256. That is mentioned in the head section of the document (view Source code). While liveHTML-Headers (a k-meleon extension) tells me the Apache-Server talks about: Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;

AFAIk K-Meleon will automatically use what the server says.
But You can make sure by trying with each mentioned charset.

K-meleon with the help of only the Cyberbit Bitstream font installed in the system:



Is it showed correctly? (I don't know arabic)

Download here, then, and install in windows (file cyberbit.zip):
http://http.netscape.com.edgesuite.net/pub/communicator/extras/fonts/windows/

EDIT: why bother, 3 answer at the same time LOL :O



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/09/2009 11:45AM by JohnHell.

An all in one font is probably the best solution for pages with missguiding font info.

JohnHell, thanks for trying to help, but the letters are not connected, while Arabic letters should be connected with each other.

The example web page uses windows-1256 meta in its header(, which should bypass server settings, right?)

Yes, the problem exist in FF 2. Only starting from FF3 the problem was fixed. I guess thats why KM doesn't show Arabic correctly as it is based on earlier FF. Wait a minute, I'm using KM352, so try the example page in FF352 not FF2. Its shows perfectly in FF352...

Quote
sallam
JohnHell, thanks for trying to help, but the letters are not connected, while Arabic letters should be connected with each other.

Oh, I understand.

But this is a computer fonts, and that means each letter is alone and just together to form words. In latin it's the same.

It's interesting if FF3 was able to connect letters and how it does.

P.S.: when I say letters I mean ideograms too, as japanese or chinese.

EDIT:
I tried this page and doesn't look bad, I think :
http://www.morocco.com/arabic/blog/tourism-in-oulmes



(font size very huge to appreciate details, over 20 pt)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/09/2009 04:23PM by JohnHell.

this is a known bug in gecko 1.8+ series so it's not a km bug per se, that's why it displays the same in ff1.5-2.0 and in km which uses that engine. it was fixed in gecko 1.9 and will be fixed when km updates to that engine.

the bug happens with right-to-left languages when specific letters in a word are coded in colours different from the rest when using arabic-windows encoding so those letters get detached 'linked out'. very few sites colourise letters out so it's quite rare and many web developers did recognise that bug and they usually used images instead of text when they wanted to single out letters in a text but that approach couldn't be implemented in your example website because apparently it teaches arabic lanaguage and using text was essential. this bug effects all right-to-left languages like hebrew, urdu and persian and not just arabic. the bug is not unique to gecko 1.8 but it also affects webkit/khtml and presto engines and only ie(trident) was singled-out because arabic-windows is a system embed font.. i'm suprised that you say it displays normally in chrome ..maybe they fixed it there but as far as i know, webkit is notorious for bad rendering of unicode fonts. i've tested with latest qtweb(same engine as chrome) and it still has that bug.

qtweb


opera 10

You're right, chrome failed to show correct text of that page. I'm sorry for the confusion, so only IE an FF3.x can show them correctly.
Does that mean that KM352 does show such text correctly?

Not only IE and Firefox 3 or higher can show that page properly.

All browsers using the Mozilla GeckoRenderingEngine 1.9 or higher (which Firefox 3.x also uses) do show that properly.

This includes all experimental K-Meleon for GRE 1.9 (You mentioned one) and K-MeleonCCF for GRE 1.9. They can usually also use GRE 1.9.1 or higher.

But there are more browsers with the GRE 1.9 engine or the 1.9.1 or higher that have improved JavaScript engine.

SeaMonkey 2, Orca, Lunascape5 just to mention 3.

It is a feature of the engine not any particular browser.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 09/09/2009 09:01PM by guenter.

gunter is right, all gecko 1.9 based browsers will display that text properly.. and eventually kmeleon when it migrates to gecko 1.9 which its release date has not been set yet, the next km 1.5.4 will still be using gecko 1.8 trunks, but remember arabic-windows encoding isn't really standard just like arabic-mac isn't. you'll notice that more professional websites like bbc arabic news use unicode encoding for their pages.. that makes their website accessible across all browsers and platforms.

that bug is very rare and you shouldn't really worry about it, in fact this is only the second website i know to have that problem it all happens with arabic-windows encoding and only when specific characters are highlighted out in different colour code. if you surf to that page frequently; i'd recommend using the ietab extension where you can use the ie trident engine inside kmeleon without the need to use an additional browser... this is what i normally do when i encounter incompatible websites.

you can download ietab extension from there:
http://kmext.sourceforge.net/ext5.htm

extract the 7z package inside kmeleon's folder and remember ietab needs to register some component files so after extracting the files go to k-meleon\components folder and delete those 2 files:
compreg.dat
xpti.dat

and restart kmeleon.. those 2 files are safe to delete and kmeleon will automatically create them with newly added ietab components registered.

to use ietab, either right click on a page or a link and select send to>trident render or ietab

the page will then be opened in a newtab using the ie engine




happy ramdan and scripture studying

arabic winblows encoding