152588 - List item bullet characters don't display in the specified font face

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, defect, P3)

Description

[Ken Harris]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.1a) Gecko/20020617
BuildID:    2002061703

Every part of Mozilla seems to be antialiased, which looks great,
except for <ol> bullets.  It's especially apparent at high zooms.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/
2. (Optional) Set zoom to 200%
3. Scroll down below the third paragraph to the bullet list

Actual Results:  All of the text is antialiased, but the bullets aren't.

Expected Results:  The bullets should be antialiased, too.

I know next-to-nothing about how Mozilla renders, but I take it
it's not as simple as "<li> in <ol> become Unicode u2022" (?).

Comment 1

[Ken Harris]

Attachment: Picture of bullets and text at 200%, and Pixie zoomed view

Blow-up of bullets and text

Comment 2

[Greg K.]

May not be a Mozilla bug. Under Quartz Text, some fonts aren't antialiased in
any application. Thus, this is an issue at the OS level.

Comment 3

[Greg K.]

Confirmed using FizzillaMach/2003021203. The marker character on a list item
doesn't display in the same font face as the list item text when possible,
though it should.

Comment 4

[Greg K.]

Attachment: XHTML testcase demonstrating the problem

Comment 5

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

There is the problem that CSS has multiple symbolic bullet types (disc, circle,
and square).  Are we guaranteed that the bullet character in the font is always
equivalent to 'disc'?

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/generate.html#propdef-list-style-type

Comment 6

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

To be clear, the markers don't display in any font at the moment, they are
hand-drawn by the layout engine.

CSS3 lists some UNICODE codepoints that we could use instead. They probably
aren't guarenteed to be the same in every font, but I don't think that's really
our problem.

Comment 9

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

This bug is basically invalid because the CSS specs have always said "The exact rendering depends on the user agent.", or similar, for list-style-type:disc etc. https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/generate.html#propdef-list-style-type

That said, we now render disc etc as text using a built-in font, with proper text anti-aliasing and scaling, so the bullet should now look great at any zoom level. We also honor an explicitly specified font-family in a ::marker rule, so an author can override that font with any font they wish.

This change (bug 1542807) just landed so it's only in Nightly (91) so far and will take a few weeks to be reach the stable branch.

Resolving this as FIXED since the issue ("pixelated bullet is ugly") was fixed by bug 1542807.