Typophile

Arabic web-font Mark feature bug in Safari

Hello,

I've stumbled upon a bug in Safari (and webkit browsers) when using the Mark feature in web fonts,
As demonstrated by the screenshot, when a word has diacritics either on the beginning or the ending, the word space gets omitted.

I've tried my own fonts, and multiples fonts by other vendors but i get the same result, Only fonts that implement the Mark feature display the error.
Is anyone else facing the same problem?

Tested on Safari 6.0.5/osx 10.8.5

AttachmentSize
ar-mark-bug.png42.88 KB

We noticed similar problems and reported them to Apple. In our case (I am not quite sure if we figured out the logic) it was a WebKit bug and seems to be present in all versions of Mac OS X from Snow Leopard (10.6) up to Maverics (10.9), although it seems to be getting better.

Yep, safari doesn't interpret diacritics correctly in arabic fonts. It is possible that problem stems from an engine that converts opentype features to AAT features in OSX, but I'm not sure about that. Also right to left kerning is not applied to the glyphs.

Captured from commoncrawl.org on 28 Apr 2015. original URL