278535 - Wish: option to use the fixed size (100dpi) fonts in the the gtk2 + xft build

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core Graveyard :: GFX: Gtk, defect)

Description

[Richard Neill]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041217
Build Identifier: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.8a6/mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu-gtk2+xft-1.8a6.tar.gz

The normal build of mozilla uses the fixed-size fonts. However, the xft+gtk2
build (which all the distros are adopting) uses ttf fonts, which are scaled and
anti-aliased.

Personally, I much prefer the former, and wish that the option for 100dpi fonts
is kept available in the newer builds. These are the fonts such as
adobe-times-iso8859-1, and I'd like to see them remain listed in the  fonts
preferences panel.

Reproducible: Always




There are 2 views of antialiased/scaled  fonts. 

Most people love them, because they can be of any size, are usually very smooth,
and look more elegant. There are also many more font faces to choose from.

However, some people, including myself, find that they simply cause eye-strain,
because they look blurry/out/of focus.

It's no good using TTF fonts with antialiasing turned off - that simply looks
horrid. But the 100dpi fonts, at fixed resolution, provide excellent
readability. The only downside is that they are only available at certain point
sizes, but that's not a problem for the display.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

To GTK GFX.  While my personal vote is wholly behind this, just based on
readability of fonts, I suspect the answer is that XFT simply can't handle those
fonts and that we've bought the XFT thing hook line and sinker for GTK2 builds...

Comment 2

[Felix Miata]

To clarify, is this request not for chrome fonts only? If so, shouldn't the
summary better indicate so?

Aren't web pages already rendered with the closest match from a font server
request to whatever the web page specifies? I'm not sure I've ever seen any web
page use CSS that specifies 'body {font-family: adobe-times-iso8859-1;}'.

Chrome font sizing we do now in GTK1 is not DPI dependant:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=169580

Aren't we using css2 system fonts:

     caption, icon, menu, message box, small caption, status bar

for the chrome? If so, aren't these just whatever the system is providing,
whether bitmap or anti-aliased or whatever the system is configured to give?

Note it seems current fontconfig versions are being released configured to
ignore bitmap fonts:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/2005-January/001137.html

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> To clarify, is this request not for chrome fonts only?

No.

> Aren't web pages already rendered with the closest match from a font server

XFT doesn't use the standard font server.

> If so, aren't these just whatever the system is providing,

This is a request to change the code in Mozilla that decides what it is exactly
that the system is providing.

And yes, if fontconfig can be configured to see these fonts that would probably
resolve the issue.  ccing keith in case he has insight.

Comment 4

[keithp]

There's nothing preventing you from using bitmap fonts with Xft and fontconfig;
newer versions of FreeType have built-in readers for .pcf.gz (and other
X-specific) bitmap font formats.

Make sure you include the bitmap directories in one of the font configuration files.

I will note that the 100dpi Adobe fonts were generated from the Adobe Type1
outlines without any manual tuning, so it is possible to generate reasonable
non-antialiased output from outline fonts.  And, of course, I think you're crazy
for preferring bitmap fonts, but there's nothing we can do about that :-)

Comment 5

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

Last comment confirms this can be fixed by configuring the font path.

-> WORKSFORME