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The diacritics in Firefox are shifted right under Linux. I wonder how can I make them normal? I use Liberation fonts.

Text: o̯equie̯

Image of what I get:

enter image description here

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1 Answer

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Probably the Liberation font used does not contain the diacritic used, U+032F COMBINING INVERTED BREVE BELOW. This forces the browser to take it from a different font. This in turn may result in inferior or, as here, completely wrong rendering, since the glyph for the diacritic has been designed for a different font.

The solution is to use a font that contains all the characters needed in the text. The character U+032F is generally present in commonly used fonts, with some odd exceptions. Check out its coverage list (not complete, but useful).

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Well under Linux there is only one usable font family - Liberation. – Anixx Aug 14 '12 at 5:45
I tried different fonts, including Verdana, Droid, Arial, Times New Roman, Nimbus, Georgia, DejaVu, Courier, but the problem does not disappear. It is just that in some fonts the brieve appears shifted left instead of right :-( – Anixx Aug 14 '12 at 5:55
@Anixx, can you post the exact source code (or URL)? The font problem that I described surely happens e.g. with Verdana and Georgia, which lack U+032F. With e.g. Arial, it does not happen if the rendering software has basic support to combining marks. But if there is a control character between the base letter and the combining mark, things probably fail. – Jukka K. Korpela Aug 14 '12 at 6:06
The text is posted in the question. You can see it above. – Anixx Aug 14 '12 at 6:07
If the text is as posted, and nothing got lost in copypaste and posting, then there is no invisible character that would explain the issue. But in the image, the diacritics are shifted to the right; they should appear below the initial “o” and the last “e”, and they do so on my Firefox (Firefox 14 on Win 7), provided that the font used contains U+032F, except for some fonts like Courier, which have an all wrong glyph (the character is spacing in them), and some fonts like Meiryo, where the diacritic is shifted to the right (like in your image). – Jukka K. Korpela Aug 14 '12 at 6:53
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