1264047 - Monospace fonts are too thin on Linux

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1245811

(Core :: Graphics: Text, defect)

Description

[Sergey Zolotarev]

Attachment: Screenshot

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0
Build ID: 20160317093216

Steps to reproduce:

Open any website that has some monospace fonts in use, e.g. GitHub.

I'm experiencing this problem on multiple installs of Linux, one is Ubuntu 16.04 and another is a fresh install of Debian 8.4.


Actual results:

Characters are rather thin and the text is hard to read.

Comment 1

[Sergey Zolotarev]

Attachment: What it looks like in Chrome

Comment 2

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

You're seeing different monospace fonts in Firefox (looks like Courier, maybe, or its Nimbus Mono clone?) vs Chrome (not sure what face that is?).

You can confirm what fonts are being used via the Inspector tools in each browser:

In Firefox, go to about:config and set devtools.fontinspector.enabled to 'true'. Then go to a page where you're seeing this issue, right-click on some of the monospace text, and choose Inspect Element from the context menu. In the inspector, select the Fonts panel and see what it reports; and look in the Computed panel to see what the font-family property says.

And in Chrome, right-click the monospace text, choose Inspect; and look in the Computed panel to see what the font-family property says (let's hope it's the same as in Firefox), and scroll to the very bottom to see what it says the Rendered Fonts for the element actually are.

Once you know what the page specified as font-family, and what each browser actually ends up using, we can consider the question of why they're different. (My guess: Firefox is respecting a fontconfig setting, while Chrome is doing its own alternative thing.)

Comment 3

[Sergey Zolotarev]

Firefox:

font-famlly: Consolas,"Liberation Mono",Menlo,Courier,monospace
Fonts: NimbusMonL-Regu system, Used as: "Nimbus Mono L"

Chrome:

font-family: Consolas, 'Liberation Mono', Menlo, Courier, monospace
Rendered Fonts: Liberation Mono—21 glyphs

Comment 4

[Sergey Zolotarev]

By the way, comments on this page look thin as well but it's a different font this time: Courier New. In Chrome it's Droid Sans Mono.

Comment 5

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

OK, so you're seeing Nimbus Mono in Firefox, and Liberation Mono in Chrome.

What does the command

  fc-match :family=Consolas

return if you run it in a terminal window?

Comment 6

[Sergey Zolotarev]

It says:

DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"

Comment 7

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Hmm, that's curious... I was wondering if there was an alias that mapped the Consolas name to another monospaced font, but apparently not.

Just to check, if you try a simple example like

  data:text/html,<div style="font-family:'Liberation Mono'">This should be Liberation Mono

in Firefox, does the Liberation Mono font display OK for you?

It's possible bug 1245811 might affect things here; could you try with the latest Nightly build (see https://nightly.mozilla.org/; check in About Nightly to confirm you have a build from at least 2016-04-13) and check whether the problem remains the same?

Comment 8

[Sergey Zolotarev]

Yeah, it seems to be exactly the same bug. I tried Firefox Nightly and everything looks good there (and the fonts tab shows Liberation Mono).