273280 - Minimum font size sometimes affects characters differently

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Ed Swierk]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041111 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041111 Firefox/1.0

Since upgrading to Firefox 1.0 on Fedora Core 3, occasionally Firefox displays
words with the font size randomly changing from character to character.  See the
attachments for two examples: one on finance.yahoo.com and another on
gmail.google.com.

I have installed the msttcorefonts RPM, which contains the Microsoft "core"
TrueType fonts like Arial and Georgia.


Reproducible: Sometimes
Steps to Reproduce:
I have not isolated the series of steps that causes Firefox to get into this state.

Comment 1

[Ed Swierk]

See http://mosquitonet.stanford.edu/~eswierk/misc/yahoo.png and
http://mosquitonet.stanford.edu/~eswierk/misc/gmail.png.

Comment 2

[Ed Swierk]

I've discovered that this occurs only when the Minimum font size is set for the
appropriate encoding, and the minimum size happens to coincide with the size
specified by the page (via either FONT SIZE or CSS).

The odd thing is that the problem doesn't always occur, even for the same page.
 Surfing around for a while induces the problem on the sites previously noted.

Comment 3

[Anthony Foiani]

Another site that causes this problem for me is Tim Bray's ongoing:

http://tbray.org/ongoing/

Sample rendering, and a snap of my text prefs:

http://scrye.com/~tkil/mozilla/mixed-char-sizes.png
http://scrye.com/~tkil/mozilla/mixed-char-sizes-prefs.png

Version info: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050323
Firefox/1.0.2 Fedora/1.0.2-1.3.1
OS info: Fedora Core 3, mostly current (had to downgrade my xorg-x11 packages to
achieve stability on my radeon,  though.)

This problem has been around for a while, though; it is not a brand new
occurrance.  (I exchanged mail with Mr. Bray on this topic in January 2005, so
it's been a few months.)

Let me know if I can experiment any further -- the "minimum point size" thing is
interesting; I know that ongoing uses some CSS tricks that might be tickling
that.   Thanks!

Comment 4

[Ryuichi KUBUKI]

*** Bug 273503 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Ryuichi KUBUKI]

WFM on Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050520
Firefox/1.0+

Comment 6

[[e-mail]]

Sorry, I should have mentioned that I run into this problem on Windows 2000 and
XP.  It's been a consistant problem under all versions of Firefox I've used.  I
was reading some of the other comments and it sounds like the problem is
intermitant under Linux.  It's consistant on Windows and has been for at least
the last year  - probably longer.

Comment 7

[[e-mail]]

(In reply to comment #6)
Sorry again.  This comment actually applied to a different bug.  I must have hit
a backspace at the wrong time or something.  I'd delete it but I can't seem to
figure out how...

Comment 8

[[e-mail]]

Attachment: Minimal test case?

This html file shows random font sizes with FF 1.5b1 but works with DP nightly
20050914.

Comment 9

[[e-mail]]

Attachment: Testcase as wrongly rendered in 1.5b1

Comment 10

[[e-mail]]

Attachment: Testcase as rendered without the font size changes in DP 20050914

Comment 11

[Kurt Swanson]

Similar for me on:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050922
Fedora/1.0.7-1.1.fc4 Firefox/1.0.7

Essentially the points of commonality are:
 - TrueType fonts
 - Fedora > 2
 - Does not appear upon intially opening the browser, trigger unknown

I get this all the time with Arial.  I tend to leave the browser open for weeks
or more, so i usually see it.

Comment 12

[[e-mail]]

I am seeing this quite often and I think that apart from the fact that the distorted font is less easily readable, this has a certain embarrassment factor to it -- FF producing "funny looking" fonts on some pages, sometimes. 

Comment 13

[Ben Darlow]

Attachment: "The Register" website shown with Helvetica installed

Here we can see the text is distorted and poorly rendered, with odd artefacts. Clearly this is not a screen font at this size.

Comment 14

[Ben Darlow]

Attachment: "The Register" website shown with Arial installed

Here is the site as rendered without Helvetica installed (instead using Arial). This is coincidentally identical output to Fx 1.0.7 regardless of whether or not Helvetica is installed.

Comment 15

[Anthony Foiani]

Still seeing this bug on FF1.5, FC4 with all current updates.  Found another URL that triggers it:

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AMERICAS_FINEST_CITY?SITE=FLTAM&SECTION=US

(Guess where I live?)  This is another site with "Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" for the offending font-family CSS entry.

Is there more information I can supply?  It sounds like maybe these are some badly-coded truetype fonts hiding behind the X font server?

Comment 16

[Brent]

I've seen this inconsistent font height bug often in Firefox, but it's hard to pin down.  Even during the same browsing session, Firefox will render the characters with inconsistent heights, and then on a later visit to that same page, with consistent heights.  Saw it today in Firefox 1.5.0.7 and in Seamonkey 1.0.4, with one use of "ctrl -", on the bold text only on http://sourceforge.net/projects/xfe

My details:  Linux, Slackware 11rc3, with the DejaVu fonts.  Firefox 1.5.0.7.  Font settings within Firefox are:
Default Font: DejaVu Serif,  size: 15.
On the Advanced window, I have:
Fonts for: Western
Proportional: Serif   Size: 15
Serif: DejaVu Serif
Sans Serif: DejaVu Sans
Monospace: Courier    Size: 12
Display Resolution: 96 dpi  Minimum font size:  None
[x] Allow pages to choose their own fonts ...

Comment 17

[Brent]

Attachment: View of font height bug in Seamonkey

Comment 18

[Brent]

Attachment: View of font height bug in Firefox 1.5.0.7

Comment 19

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

WFM with 21.0a1 (2013-02-19).