default fonts for Mac could be improved
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(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, enhancement)
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(Reporter: ph, Unassigned)
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(1 file, 1 obsolete file)
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3.91 KB,
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User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:90.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/90.0
Steps to reproduce:
Firefox’s current list of Mac default fonts includes some strange (outdated?) choices – e.g., none of the defaults for Chinese include any Chinese characters. Some suggested improvements are attached. In compiling them, I chose from the list at https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/gfx/thebes/StandardFonts-macos.inc, giving preference to:
(1) fonts that fit their style category (sans/serif/mono)
(2) fonts that contain the language for which they are the default
(3) fonts with more weights
(4) fonts with wider glyph coverage.
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Updated•4 years ago
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Reporter | |
Comment 1•4 years ago
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Comment 2•4 years ago
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Thanks for the proposals here, we should definitely look this over in detail.
Regarding Chinese fonts: the Chinese prefs are the way they are because user feedback indicated that where Latin text is mixed into Chinese pages (not uncommon), it was preferable to use a "real" Latin font (such as Times or Arial) rather than the Latin glyphs present in many Chinese fonts. Because the mapping of the generic fonts depends on the lang tag of the page (or other element), not on the script of the specific characters (this is something I'd like to revise...), the proposed changes would mean that Latin words in a page with lang="zh-CH" and font-family: serif, for example, would render with the Latin glyphs of Songti SC, which many people consider quite ugly compared to Times New Roman.
This is why various of the font lists for Chinese had a Western font prefixed; they also list appropriate Chinese fonts in the font.name-list.* prefs (although it's possible some of them would benefit from updating). The real solution here, though, is to re-factor the whole font preferences mechanism to be based more on Unicode scripts (and then, where appropriate, language tags) than on the legacy "language group" concept.
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Comment 3•4 years ago
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(In reply to Jonathan Kew (:jfkthame) from comment #2)
Songti SC, which many people consider quite ugly compared to Times New Roman
Forgive the question, but are you sure it was Songti they were complaining about and not some other font? I know that a lot of OS-supplied CJK fonts have historically included atrocious Latin character sets, but I remember thinking of Songti as a significant step forward in that regard when it first came out. To my eye it's a quite decent Garalde with nothing objectionable about it unless one insists on having a two-story "a." But maybe my expectations were lowered by all the bad fonts that came before it.
The real solution here, though, is to re-factor the whole font preferences mechanism to be based more on Unicode scripts
That would be a great improvement, and I wish I had the skills to help make it happen!
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