There don't appear to be any webfonts in use, so there won't be much in MediaWiki's control.

The letters that are showing as boxes in your screenshot are all bold text -- this probably indicates the browser's text rendering engine is not finding a bold font variant, and instead of simulating one by thickening the default font it shows boxes.

Chrome 15 on Mac OS X 10.7 shows them fine for me (though it's clearly not a "real" bold font, but a simulated one) so it's likely a lower-level issues on the Linux/Unix build and its font rendering.

WFM on:

• OSX 10.7.2 / Chrome 15.0.874.120
• Windows 7 "all language packs installed" / Chrome 15.0.874.120 m
• Windows XP "clean install Dutch" / Chrome 15.0.874.106 m

I'm guessing it's an OS or browser thing.

Mark, it probably is an OS/browser thing - my wild guess is that the bold version of the font is not installed and the browser is not smart enough to use a regular one instead.

Can you please try the same text on a site with WebFonts? -
http://translatewiki.net/wiki/User:Amire80/Tamil_test

(Actually, it's possible that it won't work there either, because AFAIU the current version of WebFonts only has partial support for bold fonts.

I am able to reproduce on Kubuntu 11.04 with Chromium 12. (Mark is using Chromium 14.)

And, as i expected, it doesn't work with WebFonts either.

Can anyone test it with Chrome 15 on Linux?

Created attachment 9418
Screenshot in Chrome 15.0.874.106 on Ubuntu 11.10 x86_64

Chrome 15 on Ubuntu 11.10 doesn't seem to fare any better.

Attached:

Same with the WebFonts test url from comment 3.

Works on Chrome 17 on Fedora16: google-chrome-unstable-17.0.932.0-108826.x86_64

Also Chrome 15 on Fedora16: google-chrome-stable-15.0.874.120-108895.x86_64

(Both from the Google repository)

Chrome 15 on Ubuntu from the Google repository had the same problems as comment #5.

Filing a bug on launchpad: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bug/888859

Feel free to add anything you feel I've missed.

This bug is applicable for many complex scripts and reported around Jan 2011 , - http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=32109 - Font selected for complex scripts loses selected font attributes, sometimes making text (Italic, bold) render as empty boxes

Isn't really invalid, but is upstream