116581 - Fonts look bad at www.theinquirer.net

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Core :: Internationalization, defect)

Description

[slice1900]

Using 0.9.7 (build ID 2001122108) on Linux the fonts in the stories at The
Inquirer look really bad.  This is a regression from previous versions.  I ran
0.9.6 again to be sure it wasn't something on my system or a change at The
Inquirer but everything looked great.  To reproduce simply visit their site and
click on one of the stories, the text quality is really bad like when the X
Server substitutes another font.  It may have some dependance on what fonts are
installed on your system, I am running Redhat 6.2 and don't think I've ever done
anything to modify my set of fonts.

Sorry if Internationalization isn't the right component, I tried to find a
similar bug and that is where it was put.

Comment 1

[slice1900]

I am seeing this also at MSNBC (http://www.msnbc.com/news/676671.asp)  I don't
know much HTML, but both places seem to be specify Arial Helvetica font faces.

Comment 2

[Dimitrios]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 46415 ***

Comment 3

[slice1900]

This can't be a dupe of 46415, since that bug has been around for ages but this
problem I am seeing is NEW with milestone 0.9.7, previous milestones did not
have this problem for me.  As I noted before, I can go back to 0.9.6 and
everything looks perfect.  It is a regression in 0.9.7, not a bug that has been
around for ages!

Comment 4

[Teruko Kobayashi]

Per [e-mail]'s last comment, I reopen this bug.

Comment 5

[Roy Yokoyama]

ok, brian may be able to help us here.
assign' to smontagu and ccing bstell.

Comment 6

[kill this account]

might be related to bug 94327

Comment 7

[Frank Tang]

please make screen shot. 

Comment 8

[Shanjian Li]

slice1900, 
Could you post 2 screen shots as requested by frank, the good one and the bad one. 
Please also set environment variable NS_FONT_DEBUG to 1. After you do that, you 
should see additional font loading information in console. Please post those information
as well. This will help us identify which font was used in your case, and what went 
wrong. Thanks.

Comment 9

[kill this account]

Setting it to 1 tells what was loaded.

Setting it to 5 tells what was looked at as well as what was loaded. This can
help explain why certian fonts were loaded ("loaded" fonts are not actually 
loaded in the X sense but are added to the font list). Sometime the problem is 
that a group of fonts were not considered when they should have been.

Comment 10

[slice1900]

Attachment: What the page should look like (generated using 0.9.6 on Linux)

Comment 11

[slice1900]

Attachment: What the page looks like for me using 0.9.7 on Linux

Comment 12

[slice1900]

Attachment: Output from 0.9.7 displaying the ugly page with NS_FONT_DEBUG=5

Comment 13

[slice1900]

OK, I added the requested attachments.  I also tried the latest nightly build, I
still see the ugly fonts with it.  For the attachment with the output for
NS_FONT_DEBUG=5, I marked the spot in the output where I clicked on the link so
it can be seen what happened from the moment I did that.  It is about 35% of the
way down the scrollbar, marked with XXXXXX's.

I see this problem on probably 5-10% of the sites I visit, including major sites
like MSNBC, just to make sure everyone realizes it isn't a problem specific to
The Inquirer.

If there are any additional things you want me to try, let me know.

Comment 14

[kill this account]

looks like urw fonts

per ftang -> shanjian

Comment 15

[Shanjian Li]

Patch for bug 94327 banned some font from consideration, and "arial" fonts are 
eliminated from font search this way. We cann't remove this hardcoded workaround 
before font banning works, and font banning has serious performance problem. 

I need to check if resolving to urw helvetica font is the best thing we can do 
for now. 

Comment 16

[Shanjian Li]

On my Redhat Linux 7.2, the ugly font loaded was 
"-abisource-arial-regular-r-normal--16-*-0-0-p-*-iso8859-1", and phsical font is 
"-abisource-arial-regular-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1". It is a scale font. 
On my system, there is no bitmap arial font and this is the best we could do. I 
was guessing that the problem does not exist in 0.9.6 probably because we were 
having problem using scale font at that time. 

Resolve this as wontfix. Hopefully better fonts and X font rendering mechanism 
can lead to a satisfactory resolution in future. 

Comment 17

[Teruko Kobayashi]

Verified as wontfix.