124306 - Italic looks horrible (as does <em>stuff</em>).

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Internationalization, defect)

Description

[Carlo Wood]

Italic looks horrible (as does <em>stuff</em>)
Not ALL italic looks horrible, but on the given URL
for example, the text "this is why a reference always must be initialized"
has the word 'always' stretched out and deformed with aweful
spacing between the characters.
In general this seems to happen for <em>, <i>, <address> etc
(see also the Copyright notice at the bottom of that page).

This is the latest nightly build, ID 2002020221 (although
the filename said 2002020218).  Everything looked fine
with version 0.9.5, I upgraded to 0.9.8 which crashed at
startup and then upgraded to this nightly build and got the
terrible fonts (ie, this is NOT a problem of my local font
server or configuration etc).

Comment 1

[Carlo Wood]

Attachment: Graphic picture of the rendering, how it should be and how it is now.

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

worksforme linux build 2002-02-07-07.  Reporter, what font do you have set as
your italic font?

Comment 3

[Carlo Wood]

1) Where can I check that?

When you mean the 'Edit->Preferences->Appearance->Fonts->
Cursive: adobe-times-iso8859-1'

then let me remark that that doesn't make any difference
what I set that to because I have (in the same preference
window) the 'Allow documents to use other fonts' marked
as 'yes'.  The document defines the font.

When I set this off (to DONT allow documents to use other
fonts), then the italic looks ok.

2) What do you want me to set it to?

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

What does 

xlsfonts | grep helvetica 

show? Just the foundry/font names; different sizes of the same font are not as
relevant (yet  :) ).

Comment 5

[Carlo Wood]

~>xlsfonts | grep helvetica | sed -e 's/\(.*\)--.*\([^-]*-.\)/\1--*-\2/' | sort -u
-adobe-helvetica-bold-o-normal--*--1
-adobe-helvetica-bold-o-normal--*--2
-adobe-helvetica-bold-r-normal--*--1
-adobe-helvetica-bold-r-normal--*--2
-adobe-helvetica-medium-o-normal--*--1
-adobe-helvetica-medium-o-normal--*--2
-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--*--1
-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--*--2
-alias-helvetica-bold-i-normal--*--0
-alias-helvetica-bold-i-normal--*--1
-alias-helvetica-bold-r-normal--*--0
-alias-helvetica-bold-r-normal--*--1
-alias-helvetica-medium-i-normal--*--0
-alias-helvetica-medium-i-normal--*--1
-alias-helvetica-medium-r-normal--*--0
-alias-helvetica-medium-r-normal--*--1
-cronyx-helvetica-bold-o-normal--*--r
-cronyx-helvetica-bold-r-normal--*--r
-cronyx-helvetica-medium-o-normal--*--r
-cronyx-helvetica-medium-r-normal--*--r
-urw-helvetica-bold-o-condensed--*--1
-urw-helvetica-bold-o-normal--*--1
-urw-helvetica-bold-r-condensed--*--1
-urw-helvetica-bold-r-normal--*--1
-urw-helvetica-medium-o-condensed--*--1
-urw-helvetica-medium-o-normal--*--1
-urw-helvetica-medium-r-condensed--*--1
-urw-helvetica-medium-r-normal--*--1

Comment 6

[Carlo Wood]

Sorry, forgot a '-' there :/

~>xlsfonts | grep helvetica | sed -e 's/\(.*\)--.*-\([^-]*-.\)/\1--*-\2/' | sort -u
-adobe-helvetica-bold-o-normal--*-iso10646-1
-adobe-helvetica-bold-o-normal--*-iso8859-1
-adobe-helvetica-bold-o-normal--*-iso8859-2
-adobe-helvetica-bold-r-normal--*-iso10646-1
-adobe-helvetica-bold-r-normal--*-iso8859-1
-adobe-helvetica-bold-r-normal--*-iso8859-2
-adobe-helvetica-medium-o-normal--*-iso10646-1
-adobe-helvetica-medium-o-normal--*-iso8859-1
-adobe-helvetica-medium-o-normal--*-iso8859-2
-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--*-iso10646-1
-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--*-iso8859-1
-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--*-iso8859-2
-alias-helvetica-bold-i-normal--*-iso8859-1
-alias-helvetica-bold-i-normal--*-jisx0208.1983-0
-alias-helvetica-bold-r-normal--*-iso8859-1
-alias-helvetica-bold-r-normal--*-jisx0208.1983-0
-alias-helvetica-medium-i-normal--*-iso8859-1
-alias-helvetica-medium-i-normal--*-jisx0208.1983-0
-alias-helvetica-medium-r-normal--*-iso8859-1
-alias-helvetica-medium-r-normal--*-jisx0208.1983-0
-cronyx-helvetica-bold-o-normal--*-koi8-r
-cronyx-helvetica-bold-r-normal--*-koi8-r
-cronyx-helvetica-medium-o-normal--*-koi8-r
-cronyx-helvetica-medium-r-normal--*-koi8-r
-urw-helvetica-bold-o-condensed--*-iso8859-1
-urw-helvetica-bold-o-normal--*-iso8859-1
-urw-helvetica-bold-r-condensed--*-iso8859-1
-urw-helvetica-bold-r-normal--*-iso8859-1
-urw-helvetica-medium-o-condensed--*-iso8859-1
-urw-helvetica-medium-o-normal--*-iso8859-1
-urw-helvetica-medium-r-condensed--*-iso8859-1
-urw-helvetica-medium-r-normal--*-iso8859-1

Comment 7

[kill this account]

-> shanjian

Since they are so wide it looks like it could be CJK glyphs.

Comment 8

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 124690 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

confirming based on duplicate

Comment 10

[lars.kuehne]

confirming, I see the same behaviour as reporter - build 2002020415, Linux.

I'm not very familiar with mozilla keywords, but shouldn't this get flagged as
"regression"? Both for Carlo and me this used to work. I didn't touch any
X-/font-/whatever-configuration, only upgraded Mozilla.

Comment 11

[Shanjian Li]

I reproduced the bug. The font used  turned out to be 
"-alias-helvetica-medium-i-normal--*-iso8859-1", which is alias of 
"-misc-kochi gothic-medium-i-normal--*-iso8859-1". The name says itself 
is a italic font, but it is in fact a japanese font. 

bstell, since we have a complicated font resolving system in mozilla, could 
we ban all font alias? 

Comment 12

[Carlo Wood]

Confirmed that this solves my problem.
After removing the rpm 'ttfonts-ja',
the pages look normal again.

RedHat rpms have the following dependency
however:
>rpm -e ttfonts-ja-1.0-6
error: removing these packages would break dependencies:
        ttfonts-ja is needed by ghostscript-6.51-12

So, as ghostscript is needed to print on non-postscript
printers (which are by far most) it is assumable that many
people have these japanese fonts installed and suffer from
this bug.

Comment 13

[kill this account]

> could we ban all font alias? 

If I had to say I would say: I guess definitely not. I suspect that there are 
groups that are quite happy with their aliases.

Comment 14

[Shanjian Li]

Then we probably should file this bug to RedHat. They shouldn't provide such a ugly 
font with an alias of "helvetica", which is very popular in X. 

Comment 15

[Shanjian Li]

Does anybody know how can I report this problem to RH?

Comment 16

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/easy_enter_bug.cgi

You'll probably need to create an account in their bugzilla.

Comment 17

[kill this account]

This is a place where font banning would solve this problem.

Comment 18

[Shanjian Li]

bstell, isn't that font banning is currently disabled because of performance?

bug 59911 in redhat was filed for this problem. 

Comment 19

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #18)
> bstell, isn't that font banning is currently disabled because of performance?
> 
> bug 59911 in redhat was filed for this problem. 

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=59911 is marked closed

should this bug be marked INVALID, as it's not a bug in mozilla.

Comment 20

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #19)

Amyy, smontagu

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=59911 is marked closed
 
if you agree, can you mark this INVALID, as it's not a bug in mozilla?

Comment 21

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=59911#c1 says:

 This bug should be fixed in 1.0-7 or higher.
 You need to upgrade ttfonts-ja to the latest version.

WORKSFORME seems more appropriate than INVALID, though we don't have a resolution which totally fits the case.