Per-character-set font size in Firefox not working?

Question

Firefox has a setting (Preferences -> Content -> Fonts & Colors -> Advanced) that is supposed to let you set font preferences for different character sets. I've tried setting larger minimum font sizes for some non-Western character sets (I'm still learning, and have to see extra detail to tell them apart!) and nothing seems to happen. For example, if there's Hangul on a page (like this one), it will show in the same size as the Latin characters around it, even if I set "minimum font size" to 24.

Am I misunderstanding how that setting is supposed to work, or does it just not do anything? Is there any other way to blow up only non-Western characters while leaving the letters I know how to read intact?

Answer 1

This feature appears to be for when a page is in a specific character encoding, not for all characters of a specific language type on a page.

The majority of sites displaying mostly latin characters while allowing the usage of non-latin characters use UTF-8 as the character encoding which is considered Western (it may be possible to change this). Wikipedia uses UTF-8 so the entire page you linked used the Western settings.

If you go to a site using a non-latin character encoding such as www.2chan.net which uses Shift_JIS, then setting the minimum font size for Japanese works and effects the entire page.

For the specific usage you are wanting, this should be possible using a browser addon or userscript that detects characters of specific languages and alters their styling. The Firefox plugin Rikaichan shows that this is possible because it adds a mouseover highlight style and tooltip popup to foreign words. I am not aware of any addon or userscript that does exactly what you want but they could exist already.