1846749 - On Ubuntu 22.04, the generic 'fantasy' font-family resolves to a non-alphabetic font called 'D050000L' which looks like dingbats/wingdings

Status: NEW

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

Description

[russell.s.harper]

Attachment: captcha.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/115.0

Steps to reproduce:

Running Mozilla Firefox Snap for Ubuntu, Firefox 115.0.2 (64-bit). Example page https://mytrailcon.com/guest/sc/quick_create, the CAPTCHA at the bottom uses five generic fonts including fantasy.

Actual results:

One character is fantasy and is rendering in a WingDing type of font. The user will usually not be able to type it correctly. Attached is a screenshot of one CAPTCHA, in the middle is an 8-pointed star being displayed, instead of the character "U".

Expected results:

As indicated in https://www.w3.org/TR/css-fonts-3/#fantasy "Fantasy fonts are primarily decorative or expressive fonts that contain decorative or expressive representations of characters. These do not include Pi or Picture fonts which do not represent actual characters." The fantasy font used in Firefox is not an alphabetic font. It may be that this font is only being used in Ubuntu under "snap", because testing Firefox under Windows shows an alphabetic font.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Graphics: Text' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:lsalzman, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 3

[russell.s.harper]

Just a heads up that the issued demoed in the link https://mytrailcon.com/guest/sc/quick_create has been resolved by removing the generic fantasy font as a display option. This is production code, so the issue had to be resolved. The underlying issue is still present which I've demoed on this page: https://russell-harper.com/fonts.html. The last line uses the generic fantasy font and under Mozilla Firefox Snap for Ubuntu, Firefox 118.0.2 (64-bit), and it shows the Latin alphabet as various star and cross glyphs.

Comment 4

[russell.s.harper]

I updated the version to 118.0.2, problem is still seen.

Comment 5

[russell.s.harper]

I updated the version to 122.0, problem is still seen.

Comment 6

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

I'm seeing this in stock Firefox (i.e. the Nightly tar.gz tarballs from Mozilla's Firefox download page); it's not specific to the snap. I filed bug 1891877 before finding this one.

I've got a testcase here: https://bug1891877.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=9397016

Copying some notes from over there:

• The font that gets used here is called D050000L and it comes from the fonts-urw-base35 package, installed by default in Ubuntu.
• That font being listed as a fantasy font is likely really an issue in the system fontconfig data (which Firefox defers to, to choose among local fonts). So ideally this is something that should be fixed at that level.
• ...and indeed, it seems Fedora fixed it in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1909382
• ...and the font package itself had an issue filed on this and took a fix for it in https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/urw-base35-fonts/issues/27 --though that hasn't yet made it to an official release, it looks like.
• So far, I can't reproduce on a system running Ubuntu 24.04 (I've only seen it on 22.04), so this might at least have been fixed there, though I'm not sure.
• (Also, if a user has another font that the system considers to be fantasy, like e.g. Impact from the ttf-mscorefonts-installer package, then that seems to be preferentially chosen, which is good news.)