293808 - Star character (★) at start of line "switches off" antialiasing or garbles display

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core Graveyard :: GFX: Gtk, defect)

Description

[Peter Weilbacher]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050510
and
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de-DE; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0+

In Gtk2+XFT builds of the trunk (like mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu-gtk2+xft.tar.gz
or firefox-1.0+.en-US.linux-i686.tar.gz nightlies) the star character ★
does bad things if it appears at the start of a line (or paragraph). In case 1,
I see that the rest of the line after the star gets completely garbled. In case
2, antialiasing for the rest of the line seems to get switched off. 

Reproducability on _my_ system (SuSE Linux 9.0 running XFree86 4.3.0.1, Glib and
Gtk 2.2.3) is 100% for case 2, and about 40% for case 1. But of the two people
in de.comm.software.mozilla.nightly-builds who tried, none could reproduce. The
choice of font does not seem to matter, I get this problem with both serif and
sans-serif fonts of different sizes. If I switch off antialiasing completely,
either by using a non-Gtk2 build or with gnome-font-properties the problem
disappears. Case 1 appears most often when a page gets fully repainted or
freshly loaded. I f I then click in the affected areas or mark them, I go from
case 1 to case 2.

Screenshots and testcase in a minute.

Comment 1

[Peter Weilbacher]

Attachment: Testcase

Comment 2

[Peter Weilbacher]

Attachment: Display of testcase

As one can see in this screenshot of the current Firefox nightly, the first
line is displayed strangely, as if AA would be switched off behind the star.
The two other lines display fine, when the star char is not at the front.
Actually, the star itself seems to get displayed always without AA.

Comment 3

[Peter Weilbacher]

Attachment: Screenshot of os2world site

Here, the upper part display part of the os2world.com site just after being
fully loaded (my case 1). The lower part is after marking and unmarking part of
the text (case 2).

Comment 4

[Peter Weilbacher]

I see the same effect on http://rdmsoft.com/r/blog/186 in the line after the
"<=". Seems that not only the star character but also other chars can produce it...

Comment 5

[Peter Weilbacher]

I am closing this as WFM. While I still have the same problem on my main workstation I think this is a problem of xft or X11 or some other software outside Mozilla, because it works on all other Linux machines that I tried.