421317 - Thunderbird's default-font options shows only one member of the font family

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[Matěj Cepl]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; cs-CZ; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080208 Fedora/2.0.0.12-1.fc8 Firefox/2.0.0.12
Build Identifier: thunderbird-2.0.0.12

(this is a clone of bug 273601 from the Red Hat bugzilla and variant of bug 419001 for Thunderbird)

The thunderbird font selector (to set the default fonts for each encodings) is
confused by fonts with many styles

For exemple it lists "DejaVu Sans" many times in its lists without giving users
a change to distinguish between the regular, condensed and extralight variants

The GNOME font selector & OO.o get this stuff right

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
multiple fonts are under one name

Expected Results:  
there should be different GUI way how to distinguish different subfamilies of one font

Comment 1

[Nicolas Mailhot]

If that matters the technical term is face not style

Comment 2

[Nicolas Mailhot]

I'm going to try to reword and summarise the problem in this comment.

1. When software was young fonts were sparse and their format limitative. One
typically had different font files and names per encoding and variant of the
same font, and all those files exposed different font family names. Applications
manipulating formatted text just had to expose a raw font family list to users,
and make minimal effort to regroup the most frequent variants/faces (regular,
bold, bold italic, italic) together. Font users browsed the raw font name list
and selected the right font file directly. Everyone knew the Microsoft font list
(for example, use Aral Black for an heavy font, use Arial Narrow for a condensed
one).

2. Strong demand from artists led to creation of more complex fonts and font
formats. Modern fonts are no longer limited encoding-wise, faces are no longer
limited to regular, bold, bold italic, italic, and more critically they're no
longer exposed under different font names. All the faces declare the same font
name, and software is expected to provide users ways to select the face they want.

3. Those complex fonts were at first limited to expensive font collections, but
are now being commodized (indeed OO.o now ships DejaVu, which is a complex font)

4. After the success of its "core fonts for the web" initiative Microsoft
decided to use its new fonts as a commercial argument. So they're no longer
freely distributed, and alternatives to Windows, IE and Office need to propose
their own font offering. Since font names are protected, that means exposing
users to new font lists, where the workarounds they learnt in 1. no longer apply.

It is therefore becoming critical to revamp the font selection UI so :
1. it can expose to users all the faces of the complex fonts which are now
getting widely distributed
2. it can help them browse non-Microsoft font libraries, so they don't run back
to Microsoft products just because they can't manage anything but the commercial
fonts it bundles with its offerings

Fortunately the technical analysis has already been done as part of W3C OpenType
and probably other specifications. Selecting the right face inside a font family
depends on three parameters:
1. font slant (font-style, FontStyle): normal, italic, oblique...
2. font weight (font-weight, FontWeight): normal, bold, light...
3. font stretch (font-stretch, FontStretch): normal, condensed, expanded...

This classification is adopted by every major actor:
http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/#font-styling (Web)
http://blogs.msdn.com/text/attachment/2249036.ashx (Windows)
http://fontconfig.org/fontconfig-user.html (Unix/Linux)

A reasonably universal and future-proof UI would therefore replace the current
font selection methods of
1. font family list 
by
2. font family + weight  + stretch list selector or 
3. font family list + weight list + stretch list selector (ie treat weight & stretch as selection axes like is already done for size)

Since for all practical means fonts do not support italic and oblique at the same time yet.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Matěj Cepl from comment #0)
> User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; cs-CZ; rv:1.8.1.12)
> Gecko/20080208 Fedora/2.0.0.12-1.fc8 Firefox/2.0.0.12
> Build Identifier: thunderbird-2.0.0.12
> 
> (this is a clone of bug 273601 from the Red Hat bugzilla and variant of bug
> 419001 for Thunderbird)

Both the above bugs have since been closed.

This is really old to still be unconfirmed. Is it really still a bug?

Comment 4

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

In the font menulist I see for example for DejaVu three entries: Sans, Sans Mono and Serif. -> WORKSFORME

Comment 5

[Matěj Cepl]

(In reply to Richard Marti (:Paenglab) from comment #4)
> In the font menulist I see for example for DejaVu three entries: Sans, Sans
> Mono and Serif. -> WORKSFORME

I don't care about this bug that much, but this is definitively not fixed. DejaVu Sans, DejaVu Serif, and DejaVu Sans Mono are three different fonts, not the font variants. Open on the same computer where you see just the three fonts (e.g., see the first screenshot) for example LibreOffice Writer and you can see (the second screenshot), not only various subtypes of DejaVu Sans (Condensed, Light), but also different styles (Book, Bold, Oblique, Bold Oblique).

Comment 6

[Matěj Cepl]

Attachment: Screenshot from 2016-09-20 22-32-48.png

Comment 7

[Matěj Cepl]

Attachment: Screenshot from 2016-09-20 22-30-30.png

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks for confirming this still exists.