501842 - Fonts display at a much lower quality than in Firefox 3.0.1

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Christopher Curzio]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070206 Firefox/3.0.1
Build Identifier: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5&os=linux&lang=en-US

After upgrading from Firefox 3.0.1 to 3.5 I noticed that fonts on every webpage (as well as fonts in the UI) have drastically decreased in display quality. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install Firefox 3.5
Actual Results:  
Fonts look terrible. 

Expected Results:  
Fonts should display consistent with how they displayed in 3.0.1.

Comment 1

[Christopher Curzio]

Attachment: Fonts as they appear in Firefox 3.0.1

Comment 2

[Christopher Curzio]

Attachment: Fonts as they appear in 3.5.

Comment 3

[Peter Weilbacher]

What's the installed version of pango and fontconfig on your system?

Comment 4

[Christopher Curzio]

pango: 1.16.4
fontconfig: 2.4.2

Comment 5

[Sylvain Pasche]

The testcase from the facebook page should be:

data:text/html,<p style='font-family: "lucida grande",tahoma,verdana,arial,sans-serif", font-size: 12.1px">Lorem ipsum dolor </p>

That looks like bug 429996, however that doesn't explain why you also see this with Firefox 3.0.
Maybe Firefox is using the pfb fonts. You could try adding this to your .fonts.conf and see if it helps:

  <!-- blacklist ugly fonts (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=429996) -->
  <selectfont>
    <rejectfont>
      <glob>/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1/*.pfb</glob>
    </rejectfont>
    <rejectfont>
      <glob>/usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts/*.pfb</glob>
    </rejectfont>
  </selectfont>

Comment 6

[Sylvain Pasche]

I mean the ~/.fonts.conf file if your not familiar with it. That's an XML file, so if you don't have it already you have to put the right header/footer:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
 ... your custom rules here ...
</fontconfig>