489902 - video controls should prefer a specific font name

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Toolkit :: Video/Audio Controls, defect)

Description

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

The time labels used in the video controls just specify "sans-serif" as the font face to be used. These should explicitly prefer the expected platform default first, with "sans-serif" as the last fallback. [Linux will probably be... exciting. :-/]

The reasoning for this is that the controls are doing pixel-precise alignment to cram all this stuff into a small area, and if non-default fonts are used things don't align right. There's no practical way to support using, say, Zapfino as the default font, and even similar fonts may cause poor results.

I noticed this because my daily-use OS X profile somehow had:

user_pref("font.name.sans-serif.x-western", "Arial");

Which caused Arial to be used instead of Helvetica, and all the text labels were 1 or 2 pixels too low as a result. [Which is somewhat surprising, because I thought Arial was supposed to have precisely copied Helvetica's metrics.]

Comment 1

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Attachment: Zapfino

Had to try the fail.

Comment 2

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Attachment: Patch v.1

Not sure that there's a good fix for this issue on Linux, because we can't really depend on any specific fonts being around, AFAIK. But this should resolve the issue on Windows and OS X, Linux should be no worse off than it is today.

Comment 3

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Comment on attachment 377898 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch v.1

a191=beltzner

Won't hold release for this, but should be super-safe. Make sure it bakes for a cycle on mozilla-central before you move it to 1.9.1

Might want to file a follow up on finding the right font for Windows. They have some much nicer choices than Arial now ;)

Comment 4

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Pushed http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/43de1fb72976

Comment 5

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Pushed to 191: http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-1.9.1/rev/16d77dc54b31

Comment 6

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

Awww, Zapfino looks great!

Comment 7

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

You know what would have been cool? Some @font-face love with one of those LCD digit fonts. Next release!

Comment 8

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Verified FIXED on latest 1.9.1 branch, trunk and B99

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1pre)
Gecko/20090608 Shiretoko/3.5pre

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b99)
Gecko/20090604 Firefox/3.5b99

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre)
Gecko/20090608 Minefield/3.6a1pre