A customer reported S'gaw Karen text rendering as dotted circles in Firefox; investigation showed the issue was not a translation bug but font shaping: some browsers and OS font fallbacks provide glyphs but lack the shaping rules needed for complex scripts like Myanmar, producing dotted circles (marks detached from base letters) rather than empty tofu boxes. Instead of adding a single language font, the fix applied at the script level: the CMS now falls back to Google’s Noto fonts for 43 modern scripts that some operating systems don’t render correctly. Those fonts are loaded on demand only when a page actually needs them, so the change fixes Myanmar (and related languages like Burmese, Mon, Shan) and dozens of other scripts without forcing unnecessary downloads.
The write-up frames localization as a layered engineering problem beyond translation - model, locale, workflow, delivery, direction, and rendering - and stresses the difference between language, script and locale (for example, Serbian in Cyrillic vs Latin, or Punjabi in Gurmukhi vs Shahmukhi). It lists specific scripts fixed (Myanmar, Georgian, Ethiopic, Khmer, Tibetan, Cherokee, Tifinagh, etc.), notes several are right-to-left, and explains how browsers, OS fonts and shaping engines interact to produce tofu or dotted circles. The CMS change improves in-editor rendering but frontends still need font choices and fallbacks checked; a checklist for frontend font hunting accompanies the technical fix.
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