1714535 - PCF font rendering is too tiny after Firefox 89 update

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1714282

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

Description

[NyanCatTW1]

Attachment: Left is Firefox 84.0.2 (the only old Firefox I have installed), and right is Firefox 89.0. Notice the text size change.

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:89.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/89.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Have a Linux system with legacy PCF font files (Ex. timB08.pcf.gz aka. Times)
2. Browse a website that uses PCF font names (Ex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Typography#Legacy_font_names)
3. Observe the font size.

Actual results:

The text is significantly smaller than in Firefox 88.

Expected results:

The text size is the same as Firefox 88.

Comment 1

[NyanCatTW1]

Using mozregression, I figure that the following changeset introduced the issue.
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/6f7a64d3796bf8acb2421721d8a6b8b94db2a067

Comment 2

[NyanCatTW1]

A temporary workaround is to remove *.pcf(.gz) font files from the system. This way, Firefox always finds the TTF fonts instead (might consider making it prefer TTF fonts over PCF fonts as well?)

Comment 3

[m.biberhofer]

Can reproduce the issue here (voidlinux, updated to FF89 yesterday, User agent "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:89.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/89.0"). On the example page provided, the three legacy fonts "Helvetica", "Times" and "Courier" are all rendered incredibly small.

Can also confirm that the workaround -- removing the *.pcf.gz font files -- worked for me (after restarting firefox).

Comment 4

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

Does setting gfx.e10s.font-list.shared=false and restarting Firefox improve the behavior here?

Comment 5

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

(I think this is really a regression from that work, which was masked by a change of mine that probably reordered the fontconfig faces in just the right way)

Comment 6

[NyanCatTW1]

(In reply to Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio) from comment #4)

Does setting gfx.e10s.font-list.shared=false and restarting Firefox improve the behavior here?

The text size is back to normal. In fact, zoom level now affects the text size as well, indicating that it might be using the TTF ones now instead.

Comment 7

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

Great, so that means that the root cause of the issue here is that the shared font list doesn't deal correctly with bitmap fonts. Let's track this in bug 1714282.