366983 - Presence of Helvetica Type 1 fonts on system causes some displayed text to be trashed.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 396315

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Tom Kloos]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a2pre) Gecko/20070114 SeaMonkey/1.5a
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a2pre) Gecko/20070114 SeaMonkey/1.5a

If Helvetica (or other fonts) are used in a page and the specific Type 1 font is installed, the display of this text may be garbage in the browser and composer.  This problem did not exist on the 2006-12-26 build and earlier.  It also appears that there's a print problem to a PCL driver after this time also.

Was this caused by changes to fix a UTF-8 bug?

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Insure the the 4 standard Helvetica Type 1 fonts are *installed* in the system fonts folder.
2.  Access www.ati.com and/or the ACID2 test (both reference and test rendering)
3.  Copy and paste text to Word or command prompt.  Correct text is displayed.
4.  Repeat on other systems -- results can differ.
Actual Results:  
Some human readable text is jibberish trash characters.

Expected Results:  
Display text as written.

Comment 1

[Tom Kloos]

Installing just the single regular Helvetica font file (hv______.pfb) is all that's needed to reproduce the bug, not all styles of the font.

Comment 2

[Tom Kloos]

It appears that some default values in prefs.js may have changed.  Manually resetting all values dealing with fonts via about:config seems to eliminate the problem.  That still doesn't explain why removing the Helvetica Type 1 font from the system "fixes" the bug or what happened following the 2006-12-26 build...  In any event, this is now a "minor" problem, if that.

Comment 3

[Tom Kloos]

Attachment: HTML file that will display message if Helvetica rendered correctly.

OK, this really is an obnoxious bug.  If the Type 1 Helvetica font is installed on the client system and the source HTML calls out style="font-family: Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;" then the font display is trashed.  Further, the same letters will display differently if separated by spaces.  ie. "ABCDE FGHIJ KLMNO PQRST UVWXY Z" is trash while "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" displays correctly.

Comment 4

[Chris Thomas (CTho) [formerly [e-mail] [e-mail]]]

Comment on attachment 252421 [details]
HTML file that will display message if Helvetica rendered correctly.

We don't require approval for patches on trunk yet.  This doesn't even look like a patch.

Comment 5

[Tom Kloos]

This continues to be an on again, off again, problem and appears to be something fundamental in the GFX:Thebes package.  See bug 381330.

070625 is OK.
070627 is broken.  SeaMonkey and Firefox trunk builds behave the same on Windows.

Comment 8

[Stuart Parmenter]

should this be a dup of 396315?

Comment 9

[Jesse Ruderman]

Yes, looks like the same issue from the screenshots.  Thanks, pav.