[Bug 249079] New: missing characters in the default font not being replaced by fallbacks from other fonts

[both1970 at hotmail.com]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249079

           Summary: missing characters in the default font not being
                    replaced by fallbacks from other fonts
           Product: kde
           Version: 4.5
          Platform: Slackware Packages
        OS/Version: Linux
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: normal
          Priority: NOR
         Component: general
        AssignedTo: unassigned-bugs at kde.org
        ReportedBy: both1970 at hotmail.com


Version:           4.5 (using KDE 4.5.0) 
OS:                Linux

Normally, when my default font doesn't contain a character (say from a
non-Latin script), it finds that character in another font and displays it.

I've noticed that in KDE 4.5, this doesn't happen in all cases. For example, if
I go to https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tamil_script in
Konqueror I get boxes for the Tamil letters, whereas in Firefox they are
displayed. I have reproduced this problem with various other scripts which are
not in my default font. Some characters (for example Chinese) do display
correctly, however, even though they are not in my default font.

This is not uniquely a Konqueror problem. It affects all KDE applications
(Kate, Kmail, etc). I know that in previous KDE versions, this was not the
case. I can't pinpoint exactly when this problem first occurred, but I believe
it happened between 4.4.4 and 4.5 (I didn't use 4.4.5).

The most important example that I have found is this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syriac_alphabet#Summary_table
Notice that the names of the letters appear as boxes, but the letters
themselves appear because they have been explicitly defined with 'font-family'
in the HTML code.

I'm guessing that KDE's selection of a fallback font is buggy in that it
chooses fallbacks which do not contain the required characters.

This also happens with a new user.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_alphabet#Present_situation

Actual Results:  
Note that several Arabic characters do not appear (ie KDE is using a fallback
font that contains some of the missing letters but not all of them).



Expected Results:  
On Firefox and Chrome, a different fallback font is used which covers all the
missing letters.

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