1356433 - letter spacing/kerning is not sufficiently changing with font-weight when using -apple-system (San Francisco)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1349308

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, defect)

Description

[Alan{H}]

Attachment: Firefox Mac vs Safari, annotated.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/57.0.2987.133 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

1. Use a variety of font weights from 100 to 900. (I tested with the OS X system font, San Francisco, using the -apple-system keyword.) Test page: http://ajh.us/fsw (= https://alanhogan.github.io/system-font-stack-experiments/wringer.html)


Actual results:

The spacing between letters shrank unacceptably with heavier weights and was too airy at lighter weights.


Expected results:

Letter spacing should be fairly consistent optically at all weights. It would be expected to match rendering in other Mac browsers fairly closely.

THIS BUG APPLIES TO MacOS, NOT WINDOWS.

Comment 1

[Alan{H}]

Attachment: macOS Sierra, Safari 10.1 - Alan v1 wringer.png

Comment 2

[Alan{H}]

Attachment: macOS Sierra, Firefox - Alan v1 wringer v2.png

Comment 3

[Alan{H}]

Attachment: win 10, firefox 52 alan-1 wringer 2017-03-29.png

This Firefox for Windows screen shot illustrates the problem _not_ happening, although the font is different here (Segoe UI)

Comment 4

[Alan{H}]

Attachment: macOS Sierra, Firefox - Helvetica wringer.png

This is another Firefox/Mac screen shot, but using Helvetica Neue. This does not seem to suffer any letter spacing issues.

Comment 5

[Alan{H}]

Note, the problem seems to affect San Francisco (-apple-system), but not other fonts such as directly-invoked Helvetica Neue. (See attached renderings.)

Comment 6

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

This sounds like bug 1349308. It should look better in a current Nightly version (see https://nightly.mozilla.org/).

Comment 7

[Alan{H}]

Attachment: Firefox letter-spacing issues and fixed (light).png

Comment 8

[Alan{H}]

Attachment: Firefox letter-spacing issues and fixed (dark).png

Comment 9

[Alan{H}]

Just wanted to say that this is confirmed fixed for me! Looks great.