1212981 - Broken rendering of "g" in Roboto Italic Webfont on hollywoodreporter

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Graphics: Text, defect)

Description

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Attachment: Screenshot of broken 'g'

Loading:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/jane-virgin-telenovela-passions-santos-830355

on Windows, I see output like in the attachment. On OSX, it works fine. When I remove the italics with the devtools inspector, it also works fine.

In case it's relevant, on Windows I see no font name in the devtools "Fonts" set when I inspect the <em> element, but on OS X the font is labeled Roboto Italic Webfont, and seems to work.

In both of these cases I'm testing beta, though I just checked and today's nightly on my Windows machine shows the same problem.

Here's my graphics config on the Windows nightly:

Adapter Description	NVIDIA Quadro 600
Adapter Drivers	nvd3dumx,nvwgf2umx,nvwgf2umx nvd3dum,nvwgf2um,nvwgf2um
Adapter RAM	1024
Asynchronous Pan/Zoom	none
Device ID	0x0df8
Direct2D Enabled	true
DirectWrite Enabled	true (6.3.9600.17999)
Driver Date	8-29-2013
Driver Version	9.18.13.2702
GPU #2 Active	false
GPU Accelerated Windows	1/1 Direct3D 11 (OMTC)
Subsys ID	083510de
Supports Hardware H264 Decoding	Yes
Vendor ID	0x10de
WebGL Renderer	Google Inc. -- ANGLE (NVIDIA Quadro 600 Direct3D11 vs_5_0 ps_5_0)
windowLayerManagerRemote	true
AzureCanvasBackend	direct2d 1.1
AzureContentBackend	direct2d 1.1
AzureFallbackCanvasBackend	cairo
AzureSkiaAccelerated	0

(this is a standard issue MoCo machine that's about 2.5 years old now - in the past, whenever I tried to update the graphics drivers, it would somehow not work and prompt me to update again after the next startup, so I'm not sure that's an option - though the above looks pretty happy to me as an amateur, apart from the obvious age of the driver itself...)

Comment 1

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

I see the same bad rendering in Chrome and IE11 on my Win8.1 machine, suggesting this is not a Firefox issue but a problem with the font and/or Windows rasterizer.

Given that the problem seems to persist even at large zoom levels, and regardless of the font smoothing setting I try, I'd guess it indicates bad hinting in the font. OS X ignores TrueType hints, which would explain why things look fine there.

Comment 2

[u279076]

(In reply to Jonathan Kew (:jfkthame) (PTO until Oct 12) from comment #1)
> I see the same bad rendering in Chrome and IE11 on my Win8.1 machine,
> suggesting this is not a Firefox issue but a problem with the font and/or
> Windows rasterizer.

In that case, should this bug report be closed or is this something we can work around?

Comment 3

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Nothing we can do, AFAICS; as a gecko core bug, this is invalid.

It's possible the site involved is using a modified or obsolete version of the Roboto Italic font (I notice they're serving it locally embedded in their CSS, rather than linking to Google Fonts); if so, they should try updating it and see if that helps.

It's also possible the problem exists upstream in the original Roboto font, in which case it's a bug for them.