458032 - Degraded font antialiasing

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 458612

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Klaus Malorny]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1b1pre) Gecko/20080927021247 Minefield/3.1b1pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1b1pre) Gecko/20080927021247 Minefield/3.1b1pre

I noticed that the antialiased font rendering changed recently, the readability decreased a lot. I am using Gnome 2.22.8 under Ubuntu 8.04. In the preferences, I have set antialiasing to "Grayscale" smoothing, "Slight" hinting and "RGB" subpixel order. The used font is "DejaVu Sans" (version 2.25 downloaded from sourceforge.net if that matters). It seems to me that these settings (or some of it) are no longer honoured. However, it could also be caused by something different. I am not an expert in that matter.

I will attach two screenshots, one taken with Firefox 3.0.x, the other with the current build. I downloaded recent builds and discovered that the change happened between the 2008-09-26 and 2008-09-27 build. 

Sorry if the problem is caused by my ignorance ;-)


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Configure "Font Rendering Details" as specified
2. Try out sample URL with different builds
3. Compare screenshots

Comment 1

[Klaus Malorny]

Attachment: Screenshot from Firefox 3.0.x

Comment 2

[Klaus Malorny]

Attachment: Screenshot from Minefield 2008-09-30

Comment 3

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

I seriously doubt this is an anti-aliasing issue.  I don't really doubt the 2 screenshots you attached were rendered using the same font.

Comment 4

[philippe (part-time)]

Same issue as bug 456578 ?

Comment 5

[Klaus Malorny]

Maybe it is related, but it is quite likely not the same, as it simply occurred for the first time at a later point in time.

Maybe it is not an "antialiasing" problem, but it relates to the font rendering. If one compares the two images, one can also note that the metrics of the characters have changed somewhat. Maybe it is related to font hinting instead. If I set it to "full hinting" in the preferences dialog, I get nearly as ugly small fonts throughout the GUI.

Comment 6

[Klaus Malorny]

Attachment: Sample Dialog from Firefox

Comment 7

[Klaus Malorny]

Attachment: Sample Dialog from Minefield

Comment 8

[Klaus Malorny]

Just to demonstrate that this bug affects the whole UI of Firefox, I have attached two screenshots showing the different rendering of the system font within the preferences dialog box. The differences are noticeable, but not that extreme as for the other example, as the font size is simply larger.

Anyhow, this rendering really annoys me, finding myself going back to 3.0 from time to time not to stress my eyes because of the reduced readability.