Closed Bug 149796 Opened 23 years ago Closed 15 years ago

Better default fonts for Hebrew

Categories

(SeaMonkey :: Preferences, defect, P2)

Product:
SeaMonkey
Component:
Preferences
Type:
defect

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED FIXED
Milestone:
Future

People

(Reporter: smontagu, Assigned: smontagu)

References

(
URL
)

Details

(Keywords: intl, Whiteboard: [adt3])

Attachments

(4 files, 3 obsolete files)

Common Hebrew fonts on windows
3.24 KB, image/gif
Details
Patch with font lists
1.93 KB, patch
mkaply
: review+
jag+mozilla
: superreview+
Details | Diff | Splinter Review
Font comparison: Times (current pref), Narkisim (patch) and Arial
23.16 KB, image/png
Details
Courier New with Hebrew glyphs (Win98, first edition)
23.93 KB, image/png
Details
One of the commonest reactions to Netscape 7 and Mozilla from Hebrew users is that the fonts are ugly. http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=adm5uc%24hu41%40ripley.netscape.com http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95227#c20 http://www.thenet.co.il/ts.cgi?tsscript=item&path=64&id=234940 I'd better translate the crucial sentence from that last one: "The Hebrew fonts are unbearable, unless you like ornate, unreadable Talmudic fonts." For Windows, I suggest at least changing to Narkisim for serif and Tahoma for sans-serif, which I believe are widely available. I don't have any good suggestions for the other families, or for the Mac.
There seems to be some other bugginess with the current behaviour: the fonts used by default to render a given language are not necessarily the same as the fonts that appear when first going into the Preferences, so sometimes if I open a Hebrew site with a new profile, go into the font preferences and press OK without changing any setting, the displayed font changes. I have also seen the same behaviour with Thai. bug 61883 comment 24 seems to be talking about this issue.
For Mac OS, two good choices would be Raanana for serif, and Arial Hebrew for sans serif. However, on many versions of mac and windows, anti-aliasing is not very good (and it is off by default), making the Hebrew serif fonts not very readble. So IMO, the best would be to default to a sans-serif font for Hebrew and not a serif font.
OS: Windows 2000 → All
Hardware: PC → All
Notice that on OSX, setting Hebrew fonts via the prefrences does not have any affect. See bug 110655
Depends on: 110655
For default serif vs. sans-serif issue, see also bug 95227
Depends on: 95227
Attached patch Patch v.1 (obsolete) — — Splinter Review
I have selected FrankRuehl and Tahoma as defaults for Windows, based on bug 134442 comment 2.
The screen shot in bug 134442 comment 2 is strange- since the fonts actually shown there are arial, tahoma and times new roman. I am attaching screen shots of the actual fonts
IMO, Tahoma is a bad choice as a default font for Hebrew, since it is larger then other hebrew fonts at the same size (see in the above screen shot), and thuse it can brake Visual Hebrew pages (which where designed with a smaller font in mind). Frankruehl has the opposite problem: it is somewhat smaller then other Hebrew fonts in the same size, making small text difficult to read. IMO, we should go for Arial and Narkisim as the Hebrew windows default fonts.
Should I open another bug for OSX on the fact that does not use proper default fonts for Hebrew? (other then bug 110655) It seems to be attempting to use the system font, and when that fails (since lucida grande on OSX does not have hebrew cmap), it uses the first font with Hebrew glyphs/cmap that it finds.
Attachment #86891 - Attachment is obsolete: true
Yes, please file a separate bug on the default fonts in OSX. I don't really know, but maybe OSX has a problem with the font names in the Mac prefs file being in Hebrew?
Keywords: nsbeta1
Do you want to use a list of fonts like other languages do? So if the primary font isn't there, other fonts will be used?
my comment #9 is now filed as bug 153296
I don't think a font list will help much for Hebrew (at least on Windows). The fonts in the patch are all available on every Windows installation that has Hebrew fonts at all. Shosh, what about Macs? Would a list be useful (maybe with Hebrew and English names)?
please get r= and sr= and land into trunk. Once that happen, we ask adt to approve it. This is a nice safe polish work. It won't impact English or other languages at all and give Hebrew users a much better experience. [adt3] because hebrew is not of the target market for adt now.
Keywords: nsbeta1 → intl, nsbeta1+
Whiteboard: [adt3]
All system 9 Macs I have seen with Hebrew (language kit or Yeda Hebrew) have Raanana Hebrew and Arial Hebrew (which is tottaly diffrent then Arial). On system X, Hebrew support is expected to come officialy around Sept. 2002, so I am not sure yet what Hebrew fonts it will include. Current OSX systems with Hebrew (Hebrew unicode keyboard hack, seen at the download page of http://www.xredlex.com ) use the Hebrew fonts from Classic. It should be also able to use Windows TTF fonts (but I was uanble to test this yet due to bug 110655). A list should be more flexible, right? If so, that is the ay we need to go (with raanan for serif and arial Hebrew for sans serif), to make sure that we do not brake too much when apple will realese the 10.2 with Hebrew support.
Depends on: 153296
No longer depends on: 110655
QA Contact: sairuh → ruixu
QA Contact: ruixu → ylong
I am sure I have seen something like this in another bug here in bugzilla, but I am unable to locate it: Mozilla 1.1 beta, on mac os 9.2.1 from yeda (clean system): the first time you go a hebrew page, the hebrew shows question marks. going into the prefrences, changing the font thten hanging it back to the original- the hebrew displays properly. Now, what bug was it? it must be fixed before this is...
*** Bug 183675 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Note: for winprefs, you can add a fallback font.name-list. This way, you can confidently pick the primary font.name as a really nice looking font (even if rare). And then, dump in the name-list the other commonly installed fonts in order of beauty. GfxWin will try the font.name first, if it is not installed, it will continue with font.name-list in the same way as a CSS font-family list order.
Depends on: 110655
Blocks: 190352
Please add "polish" to the keywords. This bug does require only a small change (a patch is available) for a noticeable improvement in the user interface. Prog.
Flags: blocking1.4b?
Attachment #88508 - Attachment is obsolete: true
Attachment #121310 - Flags: superreview?(roc+moz)
Attachment #121310 - Flags: review?(mkaply)
Comment on attachment 121310 [details] [diff] [review] Patch with font lists The bug is marked as OS=All/Platform=All but the patch only covers Windows (but not OS/2 - why?) and Mac. What about Linux/Solaris/AIX etc. ?!
Attachment #121310 - Flags: review?(mkaply) → review+
we don't need an OS/2 patch.
Default Hebrew fonts on Linux are ugly too, but, at least in my experience, the only way to get better ones is to download and install them yourself. Changing the default prefs doesn't help because there is nothing much to choose from.
Simon Montagu wrote: > Default Hebrew fonts on Linux are ugly too, but, at least in my experience, > the only way to get better ones is to download and install them yourself. Yeah, but that is a Linux-only problem. On Solaris and other Unices the OS usually provides useable hebrew fonts... IMHO we should try to cover that issue somehow...
OK, two questions. Which fonts does Mozilla use by default on those Unices? Are there other fonts normally available which are better? I want to know that there's a problem before we try to fix it. :-)
Attachment #121310 - Flags: superreview?(roc+moz) → superreview?(rbs)
Simon Montagu wrote: > OK, two questions. Which fonts does Mozilla use by default on those Unices? On those platforms which have CDE there are the "dt-interface system-*" aliases which map to the "font-of-choice" for that locale/OS (hebrew would be "dt-interface system-iso8859-8"). See bug 202921 comment #2 ... > Are there other fonts normally available which are better? I want to know that > there's a problem before we try to fix it. :-) Well, as I said on IRC - the best idea is to try to use the "dt-interface system-*" fonts if available since they represent what the OS vendor prefers for it's flavour of Unix. I am working on that right now in bug 202921 ...
So if you are working on a generic solution for the Unix default fonts in bug 202921, you have no objection to a solution being checked in for other platforms in this bug, am I right?
Simon Montagu wrote: > So if you are working on a generic solution for the Unix default fonts in bug > 202921, you have no objection to a solution being checked in for other > platforms in this bug, am I right? Erm... no problem from my side... :) I was just curious if you are planning to the fix issue for Unix within this bug, too...
I totally agree with comment 2, Hebrew fonts should be set by default to Sans Serif - on any platform. It is simply a matter of legibility. Please don't make this a Windows-only feature. Prog.
The serif/sans-serif issue is covered elsewhere. I'm certainly not trying to make this a "windows-only" issue, but the current windows defaults for Hebrew are doubly terrible, since they are just copied from the Western defaults.
Comment on attachment 121310 [details] [diff] [review] Patch with font lists sr=jag on the Windows part of the patch.
Attachment #121310 - Flags: superreview?(rbs) → superreview+
jag, why are you only sr'ing the Windows part of the patch? sr is not supposed to be platform specific review.
jag and I talked about it on IRC and agreed to postpone the Mac part until I could test it and/or until the Mac-specific blockers were resolved.
Flags: blocking1.4b? → blocking1.4b-
If you are waiting for bug #110655 to be fixed before you work on this one- it will take a while, as no one is activly working on it (and the users are just giving up gekco browsers and move to Safari)
> The serif/sans-serif issue is covered elsewhere. The only somewhat-related bugs that I could find are Bug 61883 - "Smarter default prefs for the 5 basic CSS fonts" and Bug 95227 - "Unable to set different default font type (serif vs sans serif) for different languages". The former doesn't talk about Hebrew and the latter merely discusses the limitation of only being able to set a single global pref for Serif/Sans Serif. Most people agree that sans-serif fonts are easier to read on the screen, while serif fonts are easier to read on paper. I think that it's also obvious from the attached screenshot that the sans-serif font (Arial) is far more legible. This is probably why other browsers (such as IE) also use sans-serif fonts as the default proportional font. Due to bug 95227, changing the default proportional font to sans-serif would apply to all languages, but this is actually a good thing as it would fix an old problem that doesn't only affect Hebrew. For the sceenshot I used http://www.haayal.co.il/story_1426 under Mozilla 1.4a/20030321/WinXP-SP1 (with ClearType set). Prog.
Priority: -- → P2
Target Milestone: --- → Future
Comment on attachment 121310 [details] [diff] [review] Patch with font lists Simon, I know it's a bit late to ask this now, but was there any good reason to replace Courier New with Fixed Miriam Transparent? IMHO, the former was a better choice. Details here: http://mozilla.org.il/board/viewtopic.php?p=3684#3684 Prog.
Blocks: 240501
Since none of the original defaults were consciously chosen for Hebrew, I replaced all of them with specifically Hebrew fonts. Your reasons for preferring Courier New are all good, but I would like to confirm that the version of Courier New on older systems even has Hebrew glyphs.
(In reply to comment #24) > Default Hebrew fonts on Linux are ugly too, but, at least in my experience, the > only way to get better ones is to download and install them yourself. Changing > the default prefs doesn't help because there is nothing much to choose from. Modern Linux distros come with Culmus fonts (http://culmus.sf.net), however, they are avalible by default only the XFT builds of Mozilla
(In reply to comment #39) > Modern Linux distros come with Culmus fonts (http://culmus.sf.net), however, > they are avalible by default only the XFT builds of Mozilla My understanding is that the default font settings in Xft builds come from fontconfig. Is that right, Jungshik? Does fontconfig include language-specific defaults?
(In reply to comment #40) > My understanding is that the default font settings in Xft builds come from > fontconfig. Is that right, Jungshik? Does fontconfig include language-specific > defaults? No, it does not come directly from fontconfig. Xft+gtk2 build picks up the default font from gtk2 configuration file (e.g. /etc/gtk-2.0). We could have added an Xft-specific default font list (a la AIX font list) but blizzard wanted Mozilla to honor the system-wide default font configuration for gtk(2).
(In reply to comment #38) > Your reasons for preferring Courier New are all good, but I would > like to confirm that the version of Courier New on older systems > even has Hebrew glyphs. It does. See attachment. Prog.
A crazy idea: how about changing the default *Serif* font to Arial? Now, I know that Arial is a *Sans Serif* font, but when it comes to Hebrew pages, the legibility improvement such a change can bring may be significant. Until Bug 95227 is solved, this is the only way to make the default Hebrew font more legible, after all, it is very unlikely that Mozilla will switch to Sans Serif fonts for all other languages (at least not until Bug 244439 and Bug 244693 are fixed). Prog.
No longer blocks: 190352
Attached patch per comment 43 (obsolete) — — Splinter Review
To anyone who might want to voluntarily review this patch, please be patient until further (and exciting!) information is posted later today. Thanks, Prog.
Comment on attachment 162101 [details] [diff] [review] per comment 43 We've done a small "usability test" and displayed Mozilla default fonts for Sans Serif and Serif to a group of users at hwzone.co.il forums (a major Israeli techsite). Both fonts (Arial and Narkisim respectively) were sized equally, and both included normal and bold versions. The results are overwhelmingly in favor of the Sans Serif font Arial. 19:1, or 95%, whichever way you'd like to look at it. The comments to the discussion echo this, as virtually all users judged Arial to be significantly more legible. This shouldn't really surprise anyone, as Hebrew is very unforgiving to Serif fonts displayed on low resolution devices such as computer screens. URL of the HWzone poll: http://www.hwzone.co.il/community/index.php?topic=89493.0 Prog.
Attachment #162101 - Flags: superreview?(mkaply)
Attachment #162101 - Flags: review?(smontagu)
(In reply to comment #46) > (From update of attachment 162101 [details] [diff] [review]) > We've done a small "usability test" and displayed Mozilla default fonts for > Sans Serif and Serif to a group of users at hwzone.co.il forums (a major > Israeli techsite). Both fonts (Arial and Narkisim respectively) were sized > equally, and both included normal and bold versions. I am not sure I agree with your test there. 1) You used a very small size (10 and not the standard 12). 2) Narkisim is not a very good screen font. However, there are better serif fonts out there (like David). We don't have to jump from serif to sans-serif) 3) If we change the default from Seif to Sans-Serif, we will be affecting *all* mozilla users (even non-Hebrew) due to bug 95227
(In reply to comment #43) > A crazy idea: how about changing the default *Serif* font to Arial? Now, I know > that Arial is a *Sans Serif* font, but when it comes to Hebrew pages, the > legibility improvement such a change can bring may be significant. That will brake web pages which use CSS to set font (not calling a font face). For example, if someone defines the headers as "serif" and body as "sans-serif" via CSS, having are serif font be actually sans-serif will brake the web page.
(In reply to comment #46) > (From update of attachment 162101 [details] [diff] [review]) > We've done a small "usability test" and displayed Mozilla default fonts for > Sans Serif and Serif to a group of users at hwzone.co.il forums (a major > Israeli techsite). Both fonts (Arial and Narkisim respectively) were sized > equally, and both included normal and bold versions. Using the same small size for serif and sans serif slants the test in favour of the sans-serif fonts. The default font size is 16.
Comment on attachment 162101 [details] [diff] [review] per comment 43 r- for the reasons in the last 3 comments
Attachment #162101 - Flags: review?(smontagu) → review-
Comment on attachment 162101 [details] [diff] [review] per comment 43 (In reply to Shoshannah Forbes, comment #47 and #48) > I am not sure I agree with your test there. > 1) You used a very small size (10 and not the standard 12). Websites use various font sizes, but only small fonts pose the legibility issues that this test was meant to uncover. > 2) Narkisim is not a very good screen font. However, there are better serif > fonts out there (like David). We don't have to jump from serif to sans-serif) When it comes to small sized fonts and Hebrew, all Serif fonts are in the same ballpark - they all suck. 10p Hebrew text clearly shows that Narkisim and David are practically illegible compared to Arial. See here: http://oren.gomen.org/mozilla/font_comparison3.png > 3) If we change the default from Seif to Sans-Serif, we will be affecting *all* > mozilla users (even non-Hebrew) due to bug 95227 That's not what this patch does. It only changes the Hebrew case. > That will brake web pages which use CSS to set font (not calling a font face). > For example, if someone defines the headers as "serif" and body as "sans-serif" > via CSS, having are serif font be actually sans-serif will brake the web page. As this poll suggests, 95% of our potential users believe that this is a small price to pay in favor of vastly better legibility. The few web-builders who may want to force Serif fonts on their users can work-around this new limitation by specifying their preferred Serif fonts, rather than just the family. I mean, if we think it's ok to expect web-builders to jump through hoops when they want to show "glow" in Gecko, why shouldn’t we expect them to workaround something that makes Mozilla easier on the eyes of 95% of our target Hebrew users? (In reply to Simon Montagu, comment #49) > Using the same small size for serif and sans serif slants the test in favour of > the sans-serif fonts. The default font size is 16. This test attempts to deal with Mozilla's legibility issues with Hebrew texts. These mostly kick in with small fonts. If you wish, I can get some input on users' attitude toward larger Serif fonts, but I'd be very surprised if anyone flips their vote. 16p Serif may be sufficiently legible, but it still looks outdated and biblical. We've had plenty of such comments in the discussion already, and I personally feel the same. There's just too much to gain from this slight bending of the rules. Please take this into account and reconsider the fate of this patch. Prog.
Attachment #162101 - Flags: superreview?(mkaply)
Product: Browser → Seamonkey
Comment on attachment 162101 [details] [diff] [review] per comment 43 Arial is now the default font on Windows (see bug 95227).
Attachment #162101 - Attachment is obsolete: true
So what does it take to wrap things up and close this bug? There's the Courier New issue (comment #37 to comment #42). Anything else? Prog.
Why has this patch not been checked in yet?
Umm, except for the Courier New thing. Definitely shouldn't change to Miriam.
From what I can tell: http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/modules/libpref/src/init/all.js this is all fixed except for the Courier New/Miriam issue. so if people agree with me, let's patch that, and if not, close this bug.
I cannot change the default Hebrew fonts on my Mandriva Cooker Firefox 2.0.0.11 setup. I heard from someone on Ubuntu and on Windows, that he could not change them either. Only assigning an explicit "font-family" on the CSS of the page has an effect of changing them. This is bad. Is Hebrew font changing going to be fixed in Firefox 3.0.x?
QA Contact: amyy → prefs
Closing based on Comment 56 and nobody has complained about Fixed Miriam Transparent ever since this bug.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 15 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
But nobody has said Fixed Miriam Transparent is an acceptable choice, either. I ask that this be reopened. Can't we just patch this and be done with it?
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