1681934 - Certain typefaces not being rendered on New York Times

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Web Compatibility :: Site Reports, defect, P2)

Description

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

I get tofu on the capitals: "[I]n order to understand the brutality..."

macOS Big Sur, M1, currently Nightly. Same under Rosetta. Beta works fine.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html?smid=tw-share

Comment 1

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

They have a broken font that fails the stricter validation we have enabled in Nightly/DevEdition builds only. See error messages in the web console:

downloadable font: Layout: bad start coverage index. (font-family: "NYTMag Serif Text Light Italic" style:italic weight:300 stretch:100 src index:0) source: https://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2019/07/18/mag-1619/assets/fonts/NYTMagSerifTextEXT-LightItalicWEB.woff

etc.

Probably the font was subsetted using a tool that just removed glyphs but didn't make the necessary changes to the OpenType Layout tables to match the reduced glyph repertoire.

On Beta/Release, we just drop the broken layout tables but still allow the font to load, so normal users won't see this (although if the font were used for content that actually depended on the OpenType features, they wouldn't work).

If you set gfx.downloadable_fonts.otl_validation to false and reload the page, the font should work.

The correct fix is for the NYT to deploy valid font resources.

(I'm sure we have this on file somewhere already.)

Comment 2

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

Attachment: text-garbage.png

I have contacted NYTimes through the partner mailing-list.

Comment 3

[Oana Arbuzov [:oanaarbuzov]]

The issue still occurs.
https://prnt.sc/vx8XyUTSasZn

Tested with:
Browser / Version: Firefox Nightly 104.0a1 (2022-06-28)
Operating System: Windows 10 Pro

Comment 4

[Calin Tanase]

The issue is still reproducible on the latest Nightly.
See also: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1767143

Tested on:
Operating system: Windows 10
Browser/Version: Nightly 111.0a1 (2023-01-19) / Chrome 109.0.5414.75

Note: Not reproducible on Chrome.

Comment 5

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Attachment: Bug 1681934 - Use the SANITIZE_SOFT processing option for OpenType Layout (OTL) tables in pre-release builds. r=#gfx-reviewers

This means that if webfont validation detects errors in OTL tables, we'll just discard
the bad layout table(s) but continue to try and use the font.

The gfx.downloadable_fonts.otl_validation pref is converted from a boolean to an integer,
allowing a choice among three behaviors:

0 - OTL tables are passed through with no validation (default in Beta/Release builds)
(same as the former 'false' setting)
1 - OTL tables are validated, reporting errors and discarding the table if broken,
but the font resource may still be used (default in Nightly/Developer Edition)
("soft validation" for a better user experience in pre-release builds)
2 - OTL table validation errors cause the font resource to be rejected
(same as the former 'true' setting, can result in unexpected font breakage)

Comment 6

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/f21faf9b8c2e
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/4d8c8d43a558
Use the SANITIZE_SOFT processing option for OpenType Layout (OTL) tables in pre-release builds. r=gfx-reviewers,lsalzman

Comment 7

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/656709889756
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/b031d63fe87a
Mark test /largest-contentful-paint/web-font-styled-text-resize-swap-smaller.html as passing.

Comment 8

[Cristian Tuns]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/4d8c8d43a558
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/b031d63fe87a

Comment 9

[railioaie]

Verified and not reproducible

Browser : Firefox 140.0 - RC
OS: macOS Sequoia 15.5