1517159 - Letters in font are sometimes taller than others

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Graphics: Text, defect, P3)

Description

[Thad Guidry]

Attachment: testFontRendering.html

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:64.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/64.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Login to Gmail account with Firefox latest.
2. See email that has subject with word "property" where the "r" is taller than rest of letters.
3. Used the Font Size slider in Developer mode on the Fonts tab (next to Computed and Animations) and noticed that moving it larger than 1.8rem and smaller than 1.4rem seem to exhibit the problem more.

I have tried to provide an attached HTML file that might help to troubleshoot the issue further, but I could not seem to get the local Google Sans font-face loaded, but its probably my inexperience with loading local web fonts.  The problem is noticed when the Google Sans font was within the downloaded style sheet with the following that I noticed when I inspected:

@font-face {
 font-family: 'Google Sans';
 font-style: normal;
 font-weight: 400;
 src: local('Google Sans Regular'), local('GoogleSans-Regular'), url(//fonts.gstatic.com/s/googlesans/v9/4UaGrENHsxJlGDuGo1OIlL3Kwp5MKg.woff2) format('woff2');
 unicode-range: U+0400-045F, U+0490-0491, U+04B0-04B1, U+2116;
}



Actual results:

letter "r" is taller than other letters in the word "property"


Expected results:

letter "r" should be the same height as "e" next to it.

Comment 1

[Thad Guidry]

Attachment: Size_3point9rem.PNG

Comment 2

[Thad Guidry]

Attachment: Size_1point4rem.PNG

Comment 3

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

In the Google Sans font, the letter 'r' has an alternate glyph that is used before 't' (and before 'f'), thanks to OpenType contextual rendering rules. If you look closely (make the font size really big to see better), the 'r' that appears before 't' has a slightly shorter and less hooked "arm" than the default 'r' as seen elsewhere.

The fact that at certain sizes its height does not match with the rest of the font suggests that it has not been hinted consistently with the rest of the font.

So I think this is a font defect (in combination with Windows font rendering; results may vary on different platforms), rather than a bug in Firefox. It's possible that tweaking the Windows font smoothing settings would affect how/whether the problem appears.

Comment 4

[Thad Guidry]

And I do have Windows ClearType Text tuned and turned on.  I've reported the issue to Google Gmail team as well, referencing this issue.  I think Jonathan is right here...that a font defect exists with Google Sans font.  I've changed the preference in the stylesheet and the problem resolved.  Hopefully, Google fixes this in the Google Sans / Product Sans family.