117434 - Letter spacing is strange

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Jens Müller (:tessarakt)]

When printing http://www.enode.de/datenbanken.php with Build 2001122611, the
letter spacing is quite strange.

See attached PDF file, produced from the Mozilla PS output.

Comment 1

[Jens Müller (:tessarakt)]

Attachment: PDF file produced from PS (printed to file)

Comment 2

[Jens Müller (:tessarakt)]

Attachment: Original PS saved by Mozilla

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

The page is using "text-align:justify" so we add space between words to make 
them be flush with the left and right edge.... The letter-spacing does not seem 
to be affected; only the word-spacing is.

Comment 4

[Jens Müller (:tessarakt)]

Well, if you look at the PDF, the later spacing _is_ strange. If you zoom in, it
becomes even more clear.

Do I understand you right that text-align:justify is not the reason for this
strange behavior?

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

hmm... yes, the PDF has some too-big letter-spacing at times.

This should not be caused by text-align:justify, but it could be....

Comment 6

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Related: bug 40130.  In fact, I bet this is a duplicate....

Comment 7

[rods (gone)]

I don't get it, but it is a core layout issue anyway.

Comment 8

[Kevin McCluskey (gone)]

Reassigning to Don

Comment 9

[dcone (gone)]

This did not get fixed by the fix to bug 37685.  I thought maybee it would.

Comment 10

[wazow]

I confirm it with another website. The text in polish is even worse. Or non
ISO-8859-1 characters are completely misaligned (big space added afterwards).
For latin characters strange letter spacing still happens like in first example
above. 

This is indeed problematic for mostly all newspaper texts printed as newspapers
often use justification. I will add a ps and pdf.

http://www.tygodnik.com.pl/numer/tp/chwin.html

Comment 11

[wazow]

Attachment: misalined printout example

Comment 12

[wazow]

Attachment: misaligned printout example translated to PDF

Comment 13

[Roland Mainz]

Attachment: Screenshot of http://www.tygodnik.com.pl/numer/tp/chwin.html (2002-03-11-08-trunk GTK+ build)

I am getting the misalignment on the _display_, too.

This looks more an issue in layout/ than in the gfx/-code (e.g. PS/GTK+ ...)
...

Comment 14

[Roland Mainz]

bstell/rbs:
Wanna take a look at this issue, please (see comment #13) ?

Comment 15

[wazow]

Attachment: screenshot with correct alignment

I give you my screenshot (RH7.2+Gnome+ID:2002030721)

For me the screen alignment is perfect. Actually this was the reason I switched
to mozilla several moths ago - it gave me text rendering quality under Linux
which is close to IE quality. Also for pages in non 8859-1 charset. It works
well also for cyrililc etc.

The things only get spoiled when I print. May it be that this is a problem with
your xserver serving fonts? Or just a font configuration in mozilla?
Perhaps screen and printer are two different problems. This seems to be very
complex for someone who does not know the internals.

Comment 16

[Roland Mainz]

Comment on attachment 74058 [details]
Screenshot of http://www.tygodnik.com.pl/numer/tp/chwin.html (2002-03-11-08-trunk GTK+ build)

Two workarounds:
- For GTK+X/lib:
Add
-- snip --
user_pref("font.x11.rejectfontpattern",
"fname=.*;scalable=false;outline_scaled=false;xdisplay=.*;xdpy=.*;ydpy=.*;xdevi
ce=.*");
-- snip --
to your prefs.js

- For Xprint remove /usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts/misc/ from Xprt's font path

Conclusion based on both workaround:
There is a bad font in X11/fonts/misc/ which causes this issue...

Comment 17

[wazow]

would be nice at least to know which font is bad. I have mixed feelings about
removing the whole directory from configs

Comment 18

[kill this account]

Roland: I'm sorry but I have very limited time and I'm focusing on Linux 
TrueType printing, bug 90385. Perhaps Frank or Shanjian can help.

Comment 19

[Kenneth Herron]

Mass-resolving some bugs related to the old Linux/Unix printing code. The old code has been removed from the tree, and the bugs are all FIXED by the new cairo-based printing system.