Some unhinted Noto fonts fail on win 8.1/IE 11

[brawer]

E-mail from @lemzwerg:

In the process of updating some screenshots in my noto-hinted repository (due to a new udhr string for Bengali) I've just discovered that apparently IE 11 on Win 8.1 refuses to display some unhinted Noto fonts, cf.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lemzwerg/noto-hinted/master/NotoNaskhArabic/NotoNaskhArabic-Regular-unhinted-ar-win8.1_ie_11.0.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lemzwerg/noto-hinted/master/NotoNastaliqUrdu/NotoNastaliqUrdu-Regular-unhinted-ur-win8.1_ie_11.0.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lemzwerg/noto-hinted/master/NotoSansBengali/NotoSansBengali-Regular-unhinted-bn-win8.1_ie_11.0.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lemzwerg/noto-hinted/master/NotoSansDevanagari/NotoSansDevanagari-Regular-unhinted-hi-win8.1_ie_11.0.png

The above images show that IE 11 uses the default system fonts of Windows 8.1 instead of loading the webfonts. Note that various other unhinted fonts like NotoSansHebrew work fine.

First I thought it is probably a problem with accessing the noto-fonts' git repository viarawgit.com', but given that the images were created at various dates, and the other browsers are just fine, I think there's a deeper problem within the fonts...

Additionally, I've just tried a live session on BrowserStack using

https://rawgit.com/lemzwerg/noto-hinted/master/NotoSerifBengali/NotoSerifBengali-Regular-unhinted-bn.html

as the page to display, and it confirms my observation: IE 11 on Win 8.1 (and other Windows versions, too) doesn't load this and some other unhinted fonts.

Is this a known problem? AFAICS, MS Edge is not affected.

[marekjez86]

@brawer are these fonts generated by the pipeline (i.e., phase III fonts) or delivered for phase II or both?

[marekjez86]

@brawer : what should we do about it? is this MS bug or something that we should document in FAQ?

[marekjez86]

we discovered we needed DSIG, we add this in a post-processing to hinted but not unhinted