Noto means "no tofu": fixing dotted circles in Myanmar text
A customer reported that S'gaw Karen text showed dotted circles in Firefox. Instead of patching one language, DatoCMS added Noto fallback fonts for 43 scripts, loading each only when a page needs it. The fix covers the CMS, not your frontend. The post explains why language, script, and locale are different, and how to debug similar rendering issues.
Noto = "no tofu". DID YOU KNOW THAT? LITERALLLLY TIL.
- qingcharles
They're confusing a few things by saying kanji is written top-to-bottom. Direction applies to all Japanese text, not just kanji -- which are simply one type of moji (characters). The traditional vertical format is called 縦書き (tategaki), and unlike the modern horizontal style (left-to-right), it runs top-to-bottom, right-to-left.
Here's some tategaki lyrics I wrote as an example:
https://codepen.io/kingcharlesone/pen/abgdPgZ
And if you want a really crazy (worst case) localization test, here's tategaki which includes English, Arabic, Hindi and some math:
- twright
In “Careless People”, in the chapter on the Rohingya Genocide, a case is made for Facebook’s complicity in it. Essentially threatening and violence-inciting content got past moderation because the font that was used didn’t support Myanmar text. So there would be a report on a post but all the mod team would see was missing Unicode characters and mark the post as okay. By the time the serious violence started it was too late.
Now, I am not claiming a lack of text support caused a genocide, and I don’t think Wynn-Williams is either. Facebook was certainly culpable though, the military had direct controls over what was allowed to be posted and suppressed dissent. The issue could have been caught much earlier on and perhaps mitigated had off-shore moderation teams been able to read posts that were being flagged.
- fifilura
Myanmar script along with Georgian script are the most beautiful. I wish I could read them.