firefox ignores fonts for Central European Sites? (Czech, Slovak)

[Tim]

On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 13:14 +0200, David Hláčik wrote:
> i am facing problem with fonts under Firefox.
>
> So far
> 1) If i change default fonts in Fonts for  "Western" it works
> great ... example : http://www.cnn.com/
> 2) If i change default fonts in Fonts for "Central European" it does
> not work at all ... example : www.seznam.cz , www.idnes.cz - and yes,
> i have checkbox to "allow sites to select their own fonts" disable

http://www.seznam.cz/ uses UTF-8

http://www.idnes.cz/ says it's windows-1250 in the homepage's HTML, and
manual prodding about agrees, but my Firefox thinks that it's UTF-8.

lynx --head http://www.idnes.cz/ shows me that the HTTP headers don't
say anything about the encoding.  So I don't know where Firefox is
getting it's UTF-8 idea from.

Firefox should let you pick fonts to be used for different regions, if
the page uses encodings that those regions use.  But for UTF-8 encoded
text, you can think of that as world-wide, or non-regional.  Though
Firefox seems to be a law unto itself as to how it deals with fonts.  I
changed the central european fonts, but not western, and just about
everything changed.

I could guess that Firefox also looks at country top-level-domain codes
in its font guessing, too.

> I noticed in step 2) That firefox will use for Czech Languages, fonts
> set for system - in gnome - look and feel - apperace  : fonts "
> Application "
> 
I notice that will change some fonts Firefox uses, but not all.  Even
though I, too, had set Firefox not to use fonts as set by the webpages.

> So it is not possible at all to change fonts for Central European =
> Czech Language for me?
> 
Are you picking a font that can be used for your language?

NB:  I can't read Czech, so I'm just going by appearances and obvious
errors in page rendering.  I am quite familiar with webpage authoring,
serving, and character encoding issues to do with it, and regularly find
Firefox behaves oddly.

Be careful about picking sans-serif fonts to use as the sans font, and
vice versa.  Firefox can be even more odd if you try to go against it's
ideas of what types of fonts it should use.

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