Amharic fonts don't render on Tor Browser Windows

Support Tor Browser Desktop
1

The Tor browser for window can not display Amharic letters. Or Amharic language is not readable. Can you pleas solve this problem. Thank you

2 Likes
2

I’m not a script (languages) expert, but AFAIK, “Amharic” is not an assigned unicode block. Instead it is Ethiopic (Ge’ez) - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amharic and the language family information in the sidebar summary on the right

Semantics aside - here’s a link: Geʽez script - Wikipedia where we have unicode blocks assigned for

  • Ethiopic
  • Ethiopic Supplement
  • Ethiopic Extended
  • Ethiopic Extended-A
  • Ethiopic Extended-B

Here’s a bigger list - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters - where “Amhraic” is not used as a term

So I assume that you mean Ethiopic, and not Amharic (but remember, I am not an expert)

How a browser renders fonts, is it has mapped what unicode code points relate to what font your system has available. So this will depend on your operating system and it’s locale (e.g. optional language fonts in Windows/Mac etc). Then, in Tor Browser, fonts are limited to a whitelist in Windows/Mac, and I’m not 100% technically sure how they handle Linux. On top of that Tor Browser bundles some fonts (different per OS)

So taking all those restrictions into account, if you don’t have a font that the browser can see/use to render each character (e.g. Ethiopic), then you end up with tofu (those rectangles with codes in them)

Here’s a test page: scripts

Did you mean Ethiopic?
What is your OS?
What do you see for Ethiopic in the TZP page? Tor Browser on my Windows renders Ethiopic just fine

Sorry for the links: seems like I can only add two links max

1 Like
3

so the font used in Windows for Ethiopic is Nyala and is whitelisted by Tor Browser. But this font was dropped in default Windows starting in Windows 10 [1] and became an supplemental font

This is indicative of a number of script TB originally supported but have since broken. This ticket [2] will most likely be used to review fonts in Windows to get back up to speed in the post Win7/8.1 world, see my comment

[1] Font List Windows 10 - Typography | Microsoft Docs
[2] Tor Browser on Windows is lacking fonts to render some kind of scripts. (#30589) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab