1108446 - Allow selective font rendering

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Graphics: Text, defect)

Description

[Ray Satiro]

Attachment: Font Comparison.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:37.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/37.0
Build ID: 20141203030202

Steps to reproduce:

I used Firefox 36.0a2 on a Windows 7 x64 computer with cleartype disabled. I noticed certain websites have fonts that appear very jagged, and I'm sure that's due to no cleartype. In the latest Chrome 39 on the same computer same webpage the fonts appear smooth (albeit a little blurry). Yet for most other pages in Chrome the fonts appear normal (no cleartype). This seems to be a good compromise where only super jagged fonts are made smooth.


Actual results:

See attachment for the difference between Firefox 36 and Chrome 39 on a Windows 7 x64 computer with cleartype disabled. The captures are from this webpage:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1420505?start=0&tstart=0
The font is probably 'Adobe Clean'.


Expected results:

I'm not sure what Chrome is doing but my observations are they have some sort of selective prediction where they decide what fonts to smooth and what fonts not to. I think that ability would be good in Firefox as an option, or maybe an option to replace just the super jagged fonts with Arial or something.

Obviously if someone has cleartype disabled they don't want it, but for some fonts that appear super jagged and barely readable without it it would be helpful to have some smoothing. Or maybe it's anti-aliasing? I don't know what they're doing but in this situation I think it looks better.

Comment 1

[Ray Satiro]

Another idea is the ability to disallow document fonts per site or per font group. Right now there is a global preference browser.display.use_document_fonts but there doesn't appear to be any way to do that per site (exception below) or per font group.

I tried a Firefox extension 'Document Font Toggle' that toggles the global preference based on the active tab and whether that site is 'always allow', 'always deny' etc. A problem with toggling the global preference there's a delay because Firefox is changing the rendering of every open tab [1].

[1]: https://github.com/7adietri/document-font-toggle/issues/5