1295641 - Helvetica Neue or its font weights are rendered incorrectly, if at all, on Windows

Status: REOPENED

(Core :: Graphics: Text, defect, P3)

Description

[Tom Gardiner]

Attachment: fontrendering.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/52.0.2743.82 Safari/537.36 OPR/39.0.2256.48

Steps to reproduce:

The font in a HTML document is set up as such:
font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif;
With a font weight of 300.


Actual results:

Firefox either ignores the font completely. As you can see in the screenshot attached the font is not the same, with arches and such appearing differently.


Expected results:

The actual font, and lighter font weight should be displayed.

Attached is a comparison between Firefox 48.0 (latest) and Opera 39.0 (latest). Opera renders the font correctly and is what Firefox should display.

Comment 1

[Tom Gardiner]

Also, the file this was tested on is located at http://tombofry.co.uk/dev/fonts.html

Comment 2

[u554753]

Hi Tom, 

Thanks for reporting this issue. It looks like this is a duplicate of an existing bug.

Comment 3

[Ben Kelly [:bkelly, not reviewing]]

(In reply to Grover Wimberly IV [:Grover-QA] from comment #2)
> *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 858002 ***

I'm not sure I buy that.  That other bug is describing an issue on linux.  This is on windows.  Also, the screenshots in the other bug look different from here.

John, any chance you could look at the screenshots here and give an opinion?  Thanks!

Comment 4

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

It looks to me like the screenshot shows Arial in Firefox, rather than any face of Helvetica Neue.

Tom, what format of Helvetica Neue fonts do you have installed? If they're old PostScript Type 1 fonts (.pfb files), I don't believe they're supported through the newer DirectWrite text system on Windows; you'd need to replace them with OpenType fonts.

If you go to the Firefox Options screen, Advanced panel, under the General section and *disable* the checkbox for "Use hardware acceleration when available", then restart the browser, does that affect the result you see? That will cause Firefox to revert to the older GDI font rendering system, which supports older font formats.

Comment 5

[Tom Gardiner]

(In reply to Jonathan Kew (:jfkthame) from comment #4)
> It looks to me like the screenshot shows Arial in Firefox, rather than any
> face of Helvetica Neue.
> 
> Tom, what format of Helvetica Neue fonts do you have installed? If they're
> old PostScript Type 1 fonts (.pfb files), I don't believe they're supported
> through the newer DirectWrite text system on Windows; you'd need to replace
> them with OpenType fonts.
> 
> If you go to the Firefox Options screen, Advanced panel, under the General
> section and *disable* the checkbox for "Use hardware acceleration when
> available", then restart the browser, does that affect the result you see?
> That will cause Firefox to revert to the older GDI font rendering system,
> which supports older font formats.

I did check for duplicates before posting this bug and couldn't find any similar. I have TrueType (.ttf) fonts installed, but tried your suggestion anyway. The font still appears to be using Arial using the old rendering system. Also, when the font is set to ONLY use Helvetica Neue as opposed to all four fonts written the original post it renders as the default Serif font.

Comment 6

[John Daggett (:jtd)]

Not a duplicate of the Linux bug. Backends are completely different code.

Comment 7

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Clear a needinfo that is pending on an inactive user.

Inactive users most likely will not respond; if the missing information is essential and cannot be collected another way, the bug maybe should be closed as INCOMPLETE.

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