370978 - Type 1 Helvetica font installed on client causes browser to display garbage text

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 366983

(Core Graveyard :: GFX: Win32, defect)

Description

[Tom Kloos]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a3pre) Gecko/20070219 Minefield/3.0a3pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a3pre) Gecko/20070219 Minefield/3.0a3pre

If Helvetica is specified for use on 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.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Insure the standard Helvetica Type 1 font is*installed* in the
system fonts folder.  "hv______.pfb" is the primary Adobe file needed.
2. Go to http://www.ati.com
3. Observe text on page and in drop-downs.
4. Copy and paste "garbage text" into Word...  Correct text appears in Word.
5. Un-install Helvetica Type 1 fonts from system.  Repeat.  Problem is gone!
Actual Results:  
e becomes ƒ
s becomes ¶
V becomes u
a becomes ¢
space becomes ?
etc.

Expected Results:  
If a copy of the real Type 1 Helvetica font is installed/available, it should be rendered correctly.

Also fails in Seamonkey trunk builds since 12/27/06.
Repeated on multiple XP systems.

Any style where font-family property evaluates to "helvetica,..." appears to display garbage if the source text spans multiple lines or contains spaces.  A few characters having this property without embedded white-space may display correctly.  That's the extent of my debug.

A workaround is to remove Helvetica so that Arial is substituted, but that's not always practical for other applications.  In Seamonkey, unchecking "Allow documents to use other fonts" is also a quick fix.

Comment 1

[Tom Kloos]

This problem has come and gone several times.  The latest in SeaMonkey nightly:
2007-06-25: No bug
2007-06-27 to present: Bug has returned

Another good site for bug demo:
http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/showbuilds.cgi?tree=SeaMonkey
Header cell of last four columns displays strange characters.