183936 - period/dot (.) and apostrophe's (') are not displayed on some web sites with Mozilla 1.2.1 XFT build

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Shane Gibson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021202
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021202


When I browse a number of web sites, some of them are displayed incorrectly.  In
the html rendered web page, periods/dots (.) and apostrophe's (') are not
rendered properly.  An example web page:

   http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0%2c1382%2c56742%2c00.html

the content:
 
    week s 802 11 Planet conference  Wi-Fi

is rendered as seen above.  However, if I highlight the text (eg to cut-n-paste)
it, the actual text copied into my buffer contains the period/dots and
apostrophes apropriately:

    week's 802.11 Planet conference. Wi-Fi

This seems to happen for about 30 to 50% of the websites I visit.  Another
example site is the Ximian web site, here's a sample page:
  
http://www.ximian.com/about_us/press_center/press_releases/index.html?pr=openlink_mono

A site that *does* render properly would be Adventure Racing Extreme; with a
sample page of:

    http://www.arextreme.com/index-cat.asp?catid=6

Another site that *DOES NOT* render properly is:

   http://optimoz.mozdev.org/

v/r
Shane
[e-mail]




Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  redhat 8.0 stock; with recent updates from Ximian Red-Carpet
2.  Mozilla 1.2.1 from Mozilla.org website; XFT build
3.  open browser up and go to sample sites listed in Details above
4.  running KDE 3.0.3 desktop
5. with XFree86 X Font Server version XFree86-xfs-4.2.0-72 running

Actual Results:  

Instead of seeing
      week's 802.11 Planet conference. Wi-Fi
I see:
       week s 802 11 Planet conference  Wi-Fi

Expected Results:  
week's 802.11 Planet conference. Wi-Fi

didn't do this under Mozilla 1.0.1

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

xft --> to blizzard

Comment 2

[Keith Briscoe]

I can't tell if this is the same bug, but it certainly seems related.  I'm using
the RedHat 8.0 Mozilla 1.2.1-XFT RPMs, and I just received an e-mail that is
showing some very weird behavior concerning apostrophes.  I'll attach the e-mail
below.  Scroll down to the part of the message that says "A Holiday Reminder on
Viruses" and look at the line beginning with "care of your computer".  The
apostrophe shows as an odd character (perhaps the unprintable character symbol)
and the text to the right of the apostrophe is totally invisible, but it shows
back up if you select it!!

Comment 3

[Keith Briscoe]

Attachment: The e-mail message with the problem

Comment 4

[Keith Briscoe]

Interestingly, the process of saving the e-mail to a file corrected the problem.
 I don't know if you can re-create what this would look like arriving in an
inbox, but clicking on the attachment as-is does NOT show the problem I see when
it's in my inbox.

Comment 5

[Neil Bird]

I also get this on RH8 and the stock 1.2.1 XFT RPMs.  Sometimes [consistent per
web page] these problem characters appear as very wide spaces.

I've not yet pinned down what distinguishes a working page from a 'borken' one.

Don't think I've seen it in emails, though.

Comment 6

[Neil Bird]

I don't pretend to follow what's going on here, but here's what I did to 'work
around' the issue.  It seems as if the XFT Moz. is accessing fonts & rendering
them itself (am I right?).  I was sure that previously it used the normal X font
list,  it now looks like it's using 'fontconfig'.  As such, it appears to be
missing the vast majority of installed fonts.  An extension to a 'fix' posted in
various places is as follows - this assumes you have access to 'that' Windows
TTF font set (or can copy them from a Windows/Fonts mount).

Not all these steps are required for Moz; most are just to let Doze fonts appear
in the normal X font list.

- Copy windows/fonts/*.ttf to a new dir. somewhere sensible like
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/windows-ttf
- make sure these file names have lower case (rename if necessary).
- in this new foint dir., do 'mkfontscale .' then 'cp font.scale font.dir'.
- Add the new dir to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fs/config

This is the bit for Moz:
- Add the new dir to fontconfig's /etc/font.conf

This seems to 'fix' two issues:
1) Moz XFT was comsing up with some serif font for everything.  While I quite
liked it, it seems to have been erroneous.  Now there's an 'Arial' font
available, it looks similar to the way it used to (plus anti-aliasing).
2) It stops various punctuation (period, comma, etc.) symbols from appearing as
wide spaces.

These two raise some questions (if I'm interpreting this correctly):
a) How can we make Moz *not* ask for an MS-specific font as it's deisplay
default (inc, menus, etc.)?  That would not seem to be right.
b) The 'bug' would actually seem to be Moz's failure to recover properly from no
Arial being present (via /etc/font.conf - not sure what the associated
/etc/font.dtd is about)
c) Will XFT Moz now only be using 'fontconfig' fonts, and are these restricted
to TrueType format?
d) Why *do* those symbols appear incorrectly in non-Arial fonts?


A summary point is:  the distinction between web pages that 'work' and 'don't
work' for these symbols seems to be those sites that specify 'Arial' as the
font-family in their CSS.  Leastways, I can reproduce it like that (or could
before I added Arial [again]).

Comment 7

[Neil Bird]

Further reading I just found for XFT config., which answers a couple of the
questions I posed above:

http://www.xfce.org/Xft_and_Xfce_mini_Howto.html

Comment 8

[Jan Villat]

I have the same problem as comment #3 : "The apostrophe shows as an odd
character (perhaps the unprintable character symbol) and the text to the right
of the apostrophe is totally invisible, but it shows back up if you select it!!" :(

I'll try the fix proposed in comment #6.

Comment 9

[Kai Lahmann (is there, where MNG is)]

does this bug still exist?

Comment 10

[Neil Bird]

I'm pretty certain I saw it in Moz 1.3 when I upgraded to RedHat 9 and it, er,
'amended' my fontconfig settings.

Comment 11

[Sven Heinicke]

I think I am having a the same problem at:

http://www.zen.org/~sven/blog/20030910.html

(my web log) I was actually using Firebird 20030908 with XFT+GTK2 snapshot and
Debian Sarge i386, and I have a date uning UTF-8 chinese characters with roman
numbers.  Usually the numbers don't show, but saving the file and cat(1)ing it
in a uxterm displays the numbers correctly.

Also, selecting a chinese character and dragging the mouse around can make the
character come and go.

Comment 12

[Felix Miata]

Bug Day

WFM on Fedora Core 1 with common mswbfnts installed using this morning's
firefox-i686-linux-gtk2+xft.tar.gz