142757 - Mozilla is totally unusable for me: fonts in the GUI are about 250 pixels tall!!!

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 104345

(Core :: XUL, defect)

Description

[roland]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0rc1) Gecko/20020417
BuildID:    2002041711

Mozilla is totally unusable for me: fonts in the GUI are about 250 pixels tall!!!
This has been going on since release 0.9.4 already, and still has not been
fixed. It may or may not have something to do with the way fonts are handled in
SuSE linux 7.3, but I haven't been able to pinpoint the problem then, and in any
case, this really MUST be solved.

Logging in as another user, such as root, makes the problem go away. However,
copying over all relevant config files and directories, such as ~/.mozilla,
~/.gnome* ~/.gtkrc, with regard to setting the right ownership and permissions
on these files, do NOT make the problem go away for my normal user account. This
has the side effect of not being  able to access my email anymore.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.Install SuSE linux 7.3
2.Install any mozilla since 0.9.4 with the mozilla installer.
3.Just use it normally, and voila, there it is.

Actual Results:  Mozilla diplays the fonts in it's GUI, (not those in it's
browser sub-window) in some absolutely HUGE font.I'm talking fonts so huge, that
only 7 characters will fit side by side on a 2048x1536 screen. This of course
causes the Mozilla window to be 10x10 screen big, making it totally unusable,
and incidentally using up all videomemory.
I can change the actual font used in the GUI, but not its size.

Expected Results:  I expect mozilla to display normal fonts in its GUI, maybe
even a little
small, because of the screen size.
I also expect to be able to change this font, via the normal gtk-theming
mechanism.

I have a screenshot up at http://www.lorentz.leidenuniv.nl/~roland/

Comment 1

[Gilles Durys]

Looks like bug 104345

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

do other GTK applications (eg gnumeric) have normal-sized fonts?

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Comments from Roland:

Yes, they have the fonts I specify in .gtkrc, or rather, that I set in
the gtk-theming part of the gnome control center, but that is written
in ~/.gtkrc

I have to use custom font because otherwise all gtk applications have
unreadably small fonts. (at 2048x1536)
---------------------------------------------

Roland, what does xdpyinfo say the DPI of your setup is?  Is mozilla set to use
the system DPI?  Does setting Mozilla to use a DPI of "96" (in Font preferences)
and then restarting Mozilla help?

Comment 4

[[e-mail]]

Reporter, have you changed the preference for the display resolution
in preferences->appearence->fonts?
If you cannot use Mozilla to change that back 
because of the big fonts try to find your 
prefs.js file (.mozilla/<profname>/<something>.slt/prefs.js)
while mozilla is not started
and edit it in a text editor (after backing up).
If you find a line like this:
  user_pref("browser.display.screen_resolution", <nnn>);
where <nnn> is a number, delete it.

Please tell us if you found that line and if deleting it changed anything.

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Mail from Roland:

see my xdpyinfo below; I'm running at 144x144 dpi^2.
Mozilla was already running at 96 dpi, but any other
setting is just as unusable. It looks as if there is
no difference at all.
I still think there is a serious problem with fonts
in mozilla.
Let me know if I can do any other tests.

screen #0:
  dimensions:    2048x1536 pixels (361x271 millimeters)
  resolution:    144x144 dots per inch

Comment 6

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

This is probably something wrong with the nsSystemFontGTK stuff at the end of
nsDeviceContextGTK.cpp.  I'm not sure how to debug it, though, without access to
the machine.  I guess I could build a build with debugging printfs in it and
post it somewhere...

Comment 7

[timeless]

evicting from UID

Comment 8

[alge]

This really really really looks like bug 104345, which was WFM'ed because the
reporter changed distros and isn't seeing it any more..

Roland: Could you try to disable TrueType fonts for X, and see if that makes any
difference? (either in your XF86Config(-4) file or xfs' config).

Comment 9

[alge]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 104345 ***