1351376 - Thunderbird pretends some fonts are not installed

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Laurent Bigonville]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Build ID: 20170317234959

Steps to reproduce:

When replying to an HTML mail sent by outlook (or office360), thunderbird is telling me that some fonts are not installed in the font menu of the composer (ie. "Times New Roman,serif (not installed)"

In the mail I can see: 'font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;'

Thunderbird is confused with the coma in the font name (which seems to be valid), maybe? The fact that there are two fonts separated by a coma but that there is one line in the menu seems to indicate so.

According to font config, the fonts are installed:

$ fc-match "Times New Roman"
Tinos-Regular.ttf: "Tinos" "Regular"
$ fc-match serif
DejaVuSerif.ttf: "DejaVu Serif" "Book"


Actual results:

The font selector menu is telling me that the fonts are not installed


Expected results:

The font menu is telling me the fonts are installed

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

We fixed the font indicator in bug 1265326 and bug 1267069, the example there was pretty much what is reported here:
  <span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:&quot;Calibri&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;;color:#1F497D">
Check our test cases in attachment 8744631 [details] and attachment 8744718 [details].

I've tried this example
  <span style='font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;'>text</span>
and this is shown as "Times New Roman,serif" in the font indicator.

I think your problem is that you're on Linux and the Microsoft font "Times New Roman" is in fact *not* installed. The "fc-match" utility gives you the best matching replacement: https://linux.die.net/man/1/fc-match

Try installing those MS fonts and see what happens. ttf-mscorefonts-installer is a package you can get for various Linux distributions. Or follow http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Font-HOWTO/, 4.3. Webcore Fonts.

Comment 2

[Laurent Bigonville]

OK, I've installed ttf-mscorefonts-installer (on debian) and now the real font is installed according to fontconfig:

$ fc-match "Times New Roman"
Times_New_Roman.ttf: "Times New Roman" "Regular"

Thunderbird is now showing me "Times New Roman,serif" in the menu, the non-installed part is gone but it's still on one line

So are there two issues here? One that it's not splitting the different fonts on different line and the fact that it's not using the fontconfig alias.

Then the other question is, what is happening (or should happen) when composing a new mail?

ATM, in a mail if I select Tinos (the alternative for Times New Roman) I get the following in the mail:

<font face="Tinos">foo bar</font>

1) It's missing the fallback to "serif", shouldn't this be added?
2) Shouldn't the alias(es) be added to the list of the font to use, something like:


<font face="Tinos,Times New Roman,serif">foo bar</font>

Comment 3

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

(In reply to Laurent Bigonville from comment #2)
> Thunderbird is now showing me "Times New Roman,serif" in the menu, the
> non-installed part is gone but it's still on one line.
Yes, that's by design.

> So are there two issues here? One that it's not splitting the different
> fonts on different line and the fact that it's not using the fontconfig
> alias.
I see no issue here. As I said in comment #1, please check our test data in attachment 8744631 [details] and attachment 8744718 [details]. Lists of fonts are in fact split, but we maintain "serif", "sans-serif", "monospace" and others at the end.
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/ce11ffed34de38d6b0f06de5298033000d5a558e#l1.56

If a font is not installed, it shows as not installed.

> Then the other question is, what is happening (or should happen) when
> composing a new mail?
> ATM, in a mail if I select Tinos (the alternative for Times New Roman) I get
> the following in the mail:
> <font face="Tinos">foo bar</font>
> 
> 1) It's missing the fallback to "serif", shouldn't this be added?
> 2) Shouldn't the alias(es) be added to the list of the font to use,
> something like:
> <font face="Tinos,Times New Roman,serif">foo bar</font>
Our HTML editor is not that sophisticated. The idea is that you can reply with a font, even if that's not installed. We don't have provisions to create font lists or add generic names. You can do all that if you manually create a template and the font indicator will remember a list of fonts used in the document so you can reuse them elsewhere. Of course you can use the add-on ThunderHTMLedit to edit the HTML of the message and to create font lists manually.

I'm closing this bug since everything works as designed, and during the whole TB 45.x cycle this is the first complaint I've seen.

Feel free to open new enhancement requests. Note that TB runs on three platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux), so platform specific features (like using fontconfig) cannot be implemented.

Creating font lists is a possible enhancement if we can come up with a UI to do it.