485229 - OS X font Monaco-9 display unclear

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 345392

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Ken Winiecki, Jr.]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021906 Firefox/3.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021906 Firefox/3.0.7

See attachments.  3.0.x displays the 9-point Monaco font on OS X unclearly, unlike 2.0.0.x and Safari.  "Monaco-9" has been the small monospace font of choice on the Macintosh for decades due to its unique clarity and programmer-friendliness.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Ken Winiecki, Jr.]

Attachment: displays of font Monaco-9 on OS X

Each sample is shown with the HTML tag that generated it and the sizes that the resulting displays would actually be equivalent to for FF2 /Safari / FF3.

Comment 2

[Ken Winiecki, Jr.]

Attachment: HTML used to generate displays of font Monaco-9 on OS X

Generates Monaco-9 font display samples for various HTML tags and remarks on the equivalent sizes of the resulting displays for FF2 / Safari / FF3.

Comment 3

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

I don't see how this depends on bug 389074. That relates to the "shaping" process - character to glyph mapping, ligatures, kerning, etc - but the eventual drawing of the glyph runs is the same whether we use the Core Text or ATSUI paths to generate them.

Comment 4

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

This is essentially a dupe of bug 345392; by default Gecko is AAing all fonts of all sizes, whereas Mac OS X sets the AA threshold and then exempts certain fonts (including, but perhaps not limited to, Monaco and those with Courier in their name) below 10px.  

Or, see bug 345392 comment 10 for a more comprehensive explanation (which also explains how you can still have fuzzy Monaco 9 even when you set the hidden Gecko pref to respect the OS AA threshold).

Unless Jonathan's implementation of CoreText for Thebes implements this fancy logic, I can't see how this bug depends on bug 389074, either.