Displaying Dynamic Fonts in Firefox

Posted on July 10, 2007 by imdonatello

Though there is a standard for displaying text in any language, a large number of Indic Language websites as of today (like tamilvu.org, kannadaprabha.com, etc) use dynamic fonts for display in browsers. Its quite irritating for Linux users like me, because as of now, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.4 (the latest one!) is unable to display dynamic fonts dynamically. Other browsers such as Internet Explorer and Netscape are able to render these automatically. The good news is that the fix is reasonably simple:

  1. Find the font on the required website: Most websites include their fonts for download. It is usually not difficult to find these, because the links are likely to readable even though it is in the midst of a lot of garbled text. Download the font.
  2. Copy the font into “~/.fonts”, that your user account’s fonts folder.
  3. Run the following command “fc-cache ~/.fonts”. I hope you are using Ubuntu/Debian. No idea what it is in Fedora, or other distros.
  4. Restart firefox and browse to the site again. This time the font will render correctly. Happy browsing!

Filed under: Linux

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8 Responses

  1. Karthik Swaminathan, on July 11th, 2007 at 9:46 am Said:

    People using fedora…!
    Look no further. The command fc-cache is also available in fedora.
    So, I think the same process as explained above for Debian based systems would work in Redhat based systems (though I have not tried it out myself)

    Reply
  2. imdonatello, on July 11th, 2007 at 9:47 am Said:

    There you have it, then. It will work on fedora as well.

    Reply
  3. Syam Kumar, on November 28th, 2007 at 12:23 pm Said:

    There is a firefox extension called ‘Padma’. It can convert many proprietary fonts into unicode. So no need to install fonts. Check it: padma.mozdev.org

    Reply
  4. lal, on January 24th, 2008 at 4:24 am Said:

    padma.mozdev.org rocks !!

    Reply
  5. zur4ik, on April 17th, 2009 at 5:47 pm Said:

    it will work correctly in firefox?

    Reply
  6. imdonatello, on April 17th, 2009 at 6:01 pm Said:

    Well, all the instructions here are for firefox. But they were for awhile ago. No idea if its useful now.

    Reply
  7. ChanHan Hy, on May 8th, 2009 at 12:14 pm Said:

    Hi, do you know the way to display embeded unicode fonts in a website work on FireFox browser???

    Now it works only IE.

    Thanks,
    ChanHan Hy

    Reply
  8. imdonatello, on May 8th, 2009 at 5:50 pm Said:

    I always thought that firefox would be able to automatically figure out unicode fonts. But a little googling around shows that there are some caveats. Have a look yourself:

    http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/firefox.html

    Can you give me an example of such a site anyway?

    Reply

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