335922 - font "palatino linotype" shows weird char spacing on some lines in cairo builds

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Harald Langhammer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060429 Firefox/3.0a1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060429 Minefield/3.0a1

The page from above URL uses the font paalatino linotype in the middle area. Some lines are rendered OK, some have weird character spacing making it unreadable. Same page displays fine with a pacifica non-cairo nightly from same day

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open the chaosempire page from above URL with a cairo build
2. Look at the text in the middle frame

Actual Results:  
some lines are unreadable

Expected Results:  
everything readable, of course

I mentioned the issue here http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=2233319#2233319 and posted two images which show the problem. In the same thread 3 other users confirmed the issue, 4 users didn't have the problem. User "Olive" found out here http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=2233571#2233571 that if Firefox is set to always use this palatino linotype font and forbid websited to select own fonts other pages also show this wrong spacing.

It was assumed that font smoothing could be the cause but I tested with font smoothing OFF / default / ClearType and all three settings gave me the same result.

I'm using WinXP SP2 with a nVidia FX5700U, forceware driver 84.20 at 1280x1024.  Btw, I checked and I really have this font installed on my system.

Comment 1

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060428 Minefield/3.0a1
I looked at a lot of sites (15), with font set to palatino linotype, but could not reproduce. The only thing I see is that an underlined g is very ugly (it strikes through the g). But maybe that's another bug. 

Comment 2

[Harald Langhammer]

For some unknown reason on some systems the bug doesn't show. On the affected systems the wrong picture is always the same, it doesn't change. It's always the same words which are wrong. User regis posted an image from his system 7 posts below mine on mozillazine forum which shows indentically replaced chars on the same words. So it's not a random displacement.

One user mentioned when deleting this font and going to the chaosempire URL his system crashed with Talkback TB18083113K

Comment 3

[Justin Kerk]

I can reproduce this, confirming.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060429 Minefield/3.0a1 ID:2006042904 [cairo]

Comment 4

[Justin Kerk]

This still happens after the fix to bug 340590.