1891877 - 'font-family:fantasy' chooses a dingbats/wingdings-style font (and produces unreadable text) on Ubuntu (D050000L from 'fonts-urw-base35' package)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1846749

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

Description

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: testcase

STR:

1. Load the attached testcase, which has some text styled with font-family:fantasy.

EXPECTED RESULTS:
Readable text (perhaps a bit decorative) per https://drafts.csswg.org/css-fonts/#fantasy-def

ACTUAL RESULTS:
Dingbats / wingdings. No readable text.

I'm using Nightly 127.0a1 (2024-04-15) on Ubuntu 22.04. I can reproduce the same issue in a Nightly from 2 years ago, too (so, not a recent regression, if a regression at all).

Font inspector tells me that the underlying font that I'm getting is D050000L.

Comment 1

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Looks like this font is from the fonts-urw-base35 package, which I think is installed by-default on Ubuntu:

$ apt-cache search D050000L
fonts-urw-base35 - font set metric-compatible with the 35 PostScript Level 2 Base Fonts
$ apt-cache show fonts-urw-base35
Package: fonts-urw-base35
Architecture: all
Version: 20200910-1
Multi-Arch: foreign
Priority: optional
Section: fonts
Origin: Ubuntu
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <[e-mail]>
Original-Maintainer: Debian Fonts Task Force <[e-mail]>
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug
Installed-Size: 11095
Suggests: fonts-freefont-otf | fonts-freefont-ttf, fonts-texgyre
Filename: pool/main/f/fonts-urw-base35/fonts-urw-base35_20200910-1_all.deb
Size: 6367248
MD5sum: 44c01bda5f0218c30a6b1aa33c7a520f
SHA1: 1b3b16db4dfd885a66005d88a5a1f4fdcd3713f1
SHA256: e1a4bf7ca50ae8a80bc98aa9e1a618e9c08fdd03d2815a93a9ebc940b8798b48
SHA512: 14de09f2e7e2be9257e9c2e47cfa353ca179bfa34bbf236560f2e8fa11fc9d991c937f260e44527875bcaba1daf7f1c156a211045e86c06df701539113ee0f73
Homepage: https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/urw-base35-fonts
Description-en: font set metric-compatible with the 35 PostScript Level 2 Base Fonts
 A commercial-quality set of PostScript Type 1 fonts, metric-compatible
 with the 35 PostScript Language Level 2 Base Fonts. This package contains
 outlines in .t1 format and metrics in .afm format of the following fonts:
 .
  C059
  D050000L
  Nimbus Mono PS
  Nimbus Roman
  Nimbus Sans
  Nimbus Sans Narrow
  P052
  Standard Symbols PS
  URW Bookman
  URW Gothic
  Z003
 .
 Extensive remakes of these fonts in the OpenType format are available in the
 GUST TeX Gyre collection in the fonts-texgyre package. The Cyrillic glyphs
 added to the now obsolete urwcyr fork of these fonts have been merged into
 the GNU FreeFont collection available in the fonts-freefont-otf or
 fonts-freefont-ttf packages.
Description-md5: 501a46344afab112f0269279340cc839
Task: print-server, ubuntu-desktop-minimal, ubuntu-desktop, ubuntu-desktop-raspi, kubuntu-desktop, xubuntu-core, xubuntu-desktop, lubuntu-desktop, ubuntustudio-desktop-core, ubuntustudio-desktop, ubuntukylin-desktop, ubuntu-mate-core, ubuntu-mate-desktop, ubuntu-budgie-desktop, ubuntu-budgie-desktop-raspi

Comment 2

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: screenshot of testcase

Comment 3

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

googling for D050000L fantasy, I found a handful of reports for this issue:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1909382
https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/urw-base35-fonts/issues/27

I guess a fix was merged over a year ago here:
https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/urw-base35-fonts/pull/46

...though that hasn't made it into an official release on that repo yet, or to distros.

We might want to add some sort of local workaround, since this is pretty catastrophic when it happens, and it might (?) affect many linux users by-default. (I just ran into this on a page that had fantasy as a fallback generic which briefly rendered before a web-font, and it was a pretty shocking experience to see a screen full of dingbats for a second before the real text rendered. :) )

Comment 4

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(er, I guess the redhat bug report in comment 3 shows that Fedora worked around this via their own distro-specific patch to fonts-urw-base35 package. So Fedora users are probably unaffected.)

Comment 5

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Note that if you happen to have installed the ttf-mscorefonts-installer deb package (not installed by default), that seems to ~work around this by providing Impact, which then becomes what fontconfig gives us for fantasy. But in the absence of that package (or another similar one), we end up using this unreadable D050000L wingdings/dingbats-style font.

Comment 6

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

I'm not able to reproduce this[1] on a system where I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 beta (not sure if that system repro'd the issue beforehand or not), so it's conceivable that Ubuntu has a system-level fix for this in version 24.04.

[1] "not able to reproduce" = fantasy just renders with a sans-serif font, which produces readable text.

Comment 7

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Looks like this was filed a little while back as bug 1846749 actually; I copied some info over there, and I'll dupe this bug there.