The Problem

The Web comes in all kinds of colours and, more importantly, characters.  Sauce customers are worldly, suave travellers, and unfortunately, us at Sauce are working so hard on making Sauce a great tool for developers everywhere that our own language skills can be a little lacking.  Specifically, for Chinese and Japanese characters on Linux.

The Solution

But there's a solution!  See, by default our Linux VMs don't have a reasonable font for rendering these characters, which is why the .cn and .jp version of sites is sometimes blocky no-glyph funtime.  If you install a font that can render those characters, that problem goes away!  Say, something like GNU Unifont?  To avoid having to install it 'by hand', we're going to write a script to do it for us, then provide the script as a prerun executable.

Script -- Hosted somewhere on the public internet

#!/bin/bash
 mkdir ~/.fonts
 cd ~/.fonts
 wget http://unifoundry.com/pub/unifont-7.0.03/font-builds/unifont-7.0.03.ttf

Capabilities -- In your test code

# I'm a Ruby example, adapt for your language!
caps = Selenium::WebDriver::Remote::Capabilities.firefox
caps.platform = 'Linux'
caps.version = '32'
caps['prerun'] = "http://www.location_of_the_script"