Closed Bug 464731 Opened 17 years ago Closed 16 years ago

Helvetica Neue Bold Outline is given higher priority than Helvetica Neue Bold if both are installed and activated

Categories

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, defect)

PowerPC
macOS
defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

()

RESOLVED FIXED

People

(Reporter: panpainter, Unassigned)

References

()

Details

Attachments

(2 files)

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092414 Firefox/3.0.3 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092414 Firefox/3.0.3 If a user has the font Helvetica Neue Bold Outline (also known as Helvetica 75 Bold Outline - normally, this is included in the Adobe Font Folio) installed and activated, the Bold Outline version is displayed when a website, using font-family: "Helvetica Neue" as part of the cascade, calls for the bold version of Helvetica Neue. It appears that the way that Firefox is pulling in the fonts simply has the Bold Outline variant meeting its criteria first - the PostScript names I'm seeing are HelveticaNeue-BoldOutline and HelveticaNeue-Bold. This appears on any site that meets that criteria - in CSS the font-family cascade starts with "Helvetica Neue" and then at some point, an element is set to display as bold (either through wrapping that element in a <strong>/<b> tag or using the CSS to specifically target that element to be bold). I've linked to Wilson Miner's website because his front page has a very prominent example of this. You can see screenshots at: http://panpainter.com/misc/ff3/helvetica-outline-issues.html Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install Helvetica Neue Bold Outline/Helvetica 75 Bold Outline 2. Activate Helvetica [Neue/75] Bold Outline 3. (Re)launch Firefox 4. Visit http://www.wilsonminer.com (or some other site known to use Helvetica Neue) Actual Results: Bolded elements are displayed as outlined versions. Expected Results: Bolded elements are displayed a bolded versions. Prioritized Helvetica Neue Bold over Helvetica 75 Bold Outline. My theory is that if Helvetica 75 were active, it might behave properly, but when a user attempts to activate that specific face, a warning is produced stating that there may be conflicts due to the two fonts have identical postscript names. In Mac OS X Helvetica Neue (the pre-installed font family) are not available for being disabled, since they're a system font. There may be a CSS workaround, but any workaround that I can envision would be immensely cumbersome and difficult to maintain, and defeats the whole point of using CSS in the first place. As far as I can tell, this is isolated to Mac OS X.
Attached image Example of the issue
Component: General → Layout: Text
Product: Firefox → Core
QA Contact: general → layout.fonts-and-text
So it seems like the issue here is an interaction between an older Type1 flavor of Helvetica Neue and the versions included with Mac OS X. If two font faces belonging to the same font family have the exact same style characteristics (italic, weight, etc.), some type of conflict is going to occur. What's the version of Font Folio you're using? In Font Folio 11 I only see "Helvetica Neue LT Std". Not sure there's a whole lot we can do about this. For multiple faces within a single family with matching style charateristics, the specific face chosen by Firefox will be a function of the order in which a Cocoa NSFontManager API lists them when the system is queried regarding platform fonts. We don't specifically weight Type 1 any differently than non-Type 1 fonts. There are specific issues related to Helvetica Neue on 10.5, see bug 420981. But I don't think that's your issue here.
I'm using Font Folio 10.
Mike, could you attach a screenshot of the list of Helvetica-Neue faces that appear in Font Book? If you look at the info for each font (Preview > Show Font Info) what are the faces that aren't contained in /System/Library/Fonts/HelveticaNeue.dfont? Are they Type1, TrueType, or OpenType Postscript? Jeffery Zeldman complaining about the same issue: http://www.zeldman.com/2008/11/13/real-type-on-the-web/#comment-39578
From your screenshots attached as "Specific font information" I'm guessing the Font Folio 10 fonts are all Type1 fonts, right?
Sorry for the really delayed reply, but that is correct that they're Type1 fonts.
Seems like this has been resolved in 3.5
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 16 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
Fwiw, this possibly got solved by bug 455243.
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