138441 - font size varies within page

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 116273

(Core :: Layout, defect, P3)

Description

[Nick Barnes]

In almost any news story at the BBC news site <http://news.bbc.co.uk/>, most of
the story is rendered in a single font, but sometimes it switches to a larger
font and then switches back again to the initial font.

Here's an example from today's news:

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1938000/1938606.stm>

This story switches to a larger font for seven paragraphs, starting with
paragraph "The 27th floor collapsed...".  Then it has three paragraphs in the
normal font (from "The plane was bound for Milan's..." to "hitting the
skyscraper.")  Then six paragraphs in the larger font (from "According to
eyewitnesses..." to "...regional Lombardy government.").  Then the rest of the
story is in the small font. 

I can't see anything in the page source to cause this, and I can't reproduce it
with small examples.  When I save page as..., the resulting local files render
OK and do not have this problem.  There seems to be an assortment of existing
bug reports which this may be related to, but I'm not enough of an expert on
Mozilla font rendering to be sure.

This is Mozilla 0.9.9 (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:0.9.9)
Gecko/20020406).  This did not happen on 0.9.7, which I was running until this week.

Comment 1

[John Levon]

WFM 2002-04-17 Trunk. Nick, can you try 1.0RC1 perhaps ?

What font prefs have you got set ??

Comment 2

[Christopher Hoess (gone)]

WFM, freshly built Linux CVS.

Comment 3

[Vadim Berezniker]

i have been seen this under linux as well from a trunk build from yesterday

It's exactly as it's described. The font randomly appears bigger and switches
back to normal. Usually only happens once in the page.

Comment 4

[James]

Reproducible as described for me too (on the suggested URL and in other pages in
the BBC web sites) in 0.9.9

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020314
Mozilla Debian Package 2:0.9.9-1 (with freetype enabled)

Comment 5

[Laura Krietemeyer]

Changing QA Contact

Comment 6

[Nick Barnes]

In answer to your question about my font prefs, here are the current values
(grep font prefs.js):

user_pref("font.name.cursive.x-western", "truetype-comic sans ms-iso8859-1");
user_pref("font.name.fantasy.x-western", "truetype-arial black-iso8859-1");
user_pref("font.name.monospace.x-western", "truetype-andale mono-iso8859-1");
user_pref("font.name.sans-serif.x-western", "truetype-verdana-iso8859-1");
user_pref("font.name.serif.x-western", "truetype-verdana-iso8859-1");
user_pref("font.size.fixed.x-western", 14);
user_pref("font.size.variable.x-western", 14);

Now here's an interesting twist: if I change anything in the font prefs panel
(e.g. changing the "Fantasy" font, not used on these pages), the bug goes away
when the page is re-rendered.  Then if I just hit Reload, the bug reappears.

Comment 7

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 116273 ***