162221 - Mac OS X font smoothing inconsistent

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Joel Nelson (don't send email)]

(Not sure of correct browser component)
Mozilla 1.1 - 2002081011
Mac OS X 10.1.5

I just upgraded to Mozilla 1.1 ("1.1 FC - Final Candidate" from MacUpdate.com).
  I noticed in this version that on some pages & e-mails (both plain and HTML)
most of the text is smoothed, but some text is not.  It does not seem to be very
reporducible; it is random but has occured multiple times this afternoon on
different profiles.  This did not occur in 1.1 beta.

Comment 1

[Niklas Dougherty]

WFM 2002-08-10-11

Do you have TinkerTool installed? What thresholds do you use? It is a recent
version? Also note that some fonts (Courier New, I think) don't support
anti-aliasing.

Also note that some Latin-1 chars that are not supported by the legacy MacRoman
encoding (notably eth and thorn) have a really ugly and non-smoothed
substitution in Moz 1.1fc (I believe this is a temp fix).

Comment 2

[Pekka Nikander]

Adding a comment instead of opening a new bug, since I think what I see is just
a variant of this one:

In 1.1fc and e.g. 2002080403 trunk build, there is a very visible and easy
to repeat font smoothing problem when composing e-mail, filling in web forms,
etc.  Whenever a line of text contains Scandinavian/German characters,
e.g. ä, ö, å, that particular line (e.g. this line) is rendered in 
unsmoothed font while all the other lines above and below it are smoothed.
Furthermore, smoothing is changed as I type (or remove) scandivian characters.
Whenever the first scandinavian character is entered on a line, smoothing
disappears.  When the last one is removed, the line is smoothed again.

So far I've seen this bug only when writing text, using a fixed width font,
but it might be present elsewhere, too.

This "feature" is not visible in some earlier versions, but I am not sure when
the change has occured.

This is quite annoying for Finns, Swedes, Danes, Norvegians, and Germans,
at least.

Comment 3

[Pekka Nikander]

It looks like this web page also shows the effect, above on the
line that contains the characters ä, ö and å, and again on this line.
Thus, quite easy to see if fixed on a given version.  Just read
this bug report and have a look :-)

Comment 4

[Joel Nelson (don't send email)]

Attachment: Screenshot taken from a plain-text e-mail message.

Comment 5

[Joel Nelson (don't send email)]

I have TinkerTool 2.2a installed, but have not enabled any of the Font Smoothing 
settings.   None of my settings have changed since I was using 1.1b.   This seems to be 
new in the 1.1fc build.  In addition to plain text mail, I also noticed this in HTML e-mail 
and some websites.

Comment 6

[Pekka Nikander]

Looking at the new attachment (id=94952), what are you
using as the quote character in the " 'Dogs "?
I would be pretty sure that it isn't the normal ASCII
quote (ASCII 39), which comes from the key right of semicolon,
but some other character.

Comment 7

[Joel Nelson (don't send email)]

I didn't send the message so I'm not sure if it's ASCII or not.   

Comment 8

[Niklas Dougherty]

Attachment: Different levels of smoothing

Disregard the first part and note the last part of comment 1. Confirming
2002-08-10-11. I believe this has something to do with the patches from bug
111728, which is a crude workaround. This and many other bugs are due to lack
of ATSUI support.

The attachment (showing bug 162148) shows that not only is the font smoothing
different, but it is also not honoring style (Per Angstrom is not italicized
like the other names, and in the source it has a lighter smoothing). There *is*
some smoothing, so I believe another font is used whenever this bug applies.
Otherwise, all style is just dropped for some reason.

(I can also confirm that when I enter the entity "Aring" in this form, it is
different in smoothing.)

Comment 9

[Niklas Dougherty]

Attachment: Different levels of smoothing

Disregard the first part and note the last part of comment 1. Confirming
2002-08-10-11. I believe this has something to do with the patches from bug
111728, which is a crude workaround. This and many other bugs are due to lack
of ATSUI support.

The attachment (showing bug 162148) shows that not only is the font smoothing
different, but it is also not honoring style (Per Angstrom is not italicized
like the other names, and in the source it has a lighter smoothing). There *is*
some smoothing, so I believe another font is used whenever this bug applies.
Otherwise, all style is just dropped for some reason.

(I can also confirm that when I enter the entity "Aring" in this form, it is
different in smoothing.)

Comment 10

[Niklas Dougherty]

Attachment: Different levels of smoothing

Disregard the first part and note the last part of comment 1. Confirming
2002-08-10-11. I believe this has something to do with the patches from bug
111728, which is a crude workaround. This and many other bugs are due to lack
of ATSUI support.

The attachment (showing bug 162148) shows that not only is the font smoothing
different, but it is also not honoring style (Per Angstrom is not italicized
like the other names, and in the source it has a lighter smoothing). There *is*
some smoothing, so I believe another font is used whenever this bug applies.
Otherwise, all style is just dropped for some reason.

(I can also confirm that when I enter the entity "Aring" in this form, it is
different in smoothing.)

Comment 11

[Niklas Dougherty]

Attachment: Different levels of smoothing

Disregard the first part and note the last part of comment 1. Confirming
2002-08-10-11. I believe this has something to do with the patches from bug
111728, which is a crude workaround. This and many other bugs are due to lack
of ATSUI support.

The attachment (showing bug 162148) shows that not only is the font smoothing
different, but it is also not honoring style (Per Angstrom is not italicized
like the other names, and in the source it has a lighter smoothing). There *is*
some smoothing, so I believe another font is used whenever this bug applies.
Otherwise, all style is just dropped for some reason.

(I can also confirm that when I enter the entity "Aring" in this form, it is
different in smoothing.)

Comment 12

[Joel Nelson (don't send email)]

Attachment: Screenshot from HTML e-mail.

Added attachment.

Comment 13

[Pekka Nikander]

As of 2002081416 1.1 build this bug seems to be (at least partially)
fixed.  However, there seems to be an annoying related bug that
appeared after 2002080403: the scandinavian characters, if entered
on the web page as Latin-1 characters instead of ä etc,
show as question marks and not as the characters as they used to be.

Comment 14

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Reporter: Is this bug now fixed ?

Comment 15

[Joel Nelson (don't send email)]

This does seem to be fixed.   I have not noticed it anytime recently.

Comment 16

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Thanks for your fast response !