54786 - Failing to recognize that some ATM proportional fonts don't belong in `Monospace'

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[Oliver Klee]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; m18) Gecko/20000929
BuildID:    2000092908

As "monospace font" in the font preferences, I can select the fonts "Arial MT"
and "Times New Roman PS MT", which are definitely not monospace. These fonts are
PS fonts that work via the Adobe Type Manager.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

cc'ing: pierre, marc, erik, david

I would posit that this is INVALID. Namely because if I (as a user) want to
select a non-monospace font as my 'monospace' generic font, I should be allowed
to do so. As Sarah pointed out, some old CS textbooks used Narrow Helvetica as
their 'monospace' font!

I'm marking this WONTFIX. If you can think of a good reason for limiting the
user's choices, then please speak up and maybe we can reopen this.

Note that before reopening it, you should think about whether we prevent users
from choosing colours that clash in the colour panel, or whether we prevent
users from picking a homepage URI that is not text/html.

Comment 2

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

> if I (as a user) want to select a non-monospace font as my 'monospace' generic
> font, I should be allowed to do so.

Since choosing a non-monospace font is absolutely guaranteed to produce 
undesirable results, one would have to ask why.

> As Sarah pointed out, some old CS textbooks used Narrow Helvetica as their
> 'monospace' font!

I highly doubt that. If anything, they would have used {font-family: sans-serif} 
for their KBD and SAMP font (it would be nice if Mozilla's html.css could do this 
too). That's altogether different from using a non-monospace font where a 
monospace font is required.

This is a usability issue, because showing all fonts makes it inordinately 
difficult to choose between the available monospace fonts. Computer programs are 
quite capable of telling which fonts are monospace and which are not -- so if 
Mozilla does not make this distinction when offering fonts in the preferences, 
while Internet Explorer does, Mozilla will just look dumb.

Comment 3

[Pierre Saslawsky]

In a previous life when confronted to the same problem where users should be free 
to select the font they want but where it was also very important to use a fixed-
width font, the solution we implemented was to show all the fonts in the dropdown 
list with the fixed-width fonts displayed in bold. I think it would work fine for 
Mozilla too otherwise, if we must choose, I'd vote like Ian: it's more important 
to show all the fonts.

Comment 4

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

pierre: i like your suggestion of displaying the monospace fonts in bold!

mpt: actually, what ian was referring to was a comment i had made over irc. it
wasn't web page that used the non-monospace font for code, it was actually a
hardcopy textbook! it was an awful, first draft of a book that a friend of mine
had for an intro to programming class. (what a terrible format to use for a book
geared at programming newbies, indeed!)

Comment 5

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

on a related note: i noticed that for some reason on winNT --at
least using 2000.10.13.09-n6 commercial branch bits-- the fonts listed in the
serif, sans serif and monospace are all different from one another. in other
words, truly serif fonts (garamond, times, etc) are only listed under the serif
droplist --and so forth for both sans serif and monospace lists. [unless there's
something odd about how fonts were originally installed on my winNT box.]

odd that the original problem was originally seen on winNT --it seems that what
i'm seeing now has been mysteriously fixed/changed on only winNT. (but i still
see the entire list on Mac OS 9.0 and linux.)

am i seeing another bug? if so, let me know what its number is... thx!

Comment 6

[Oliver Klee]

Sorry, maybe my bug report wasn't specific enough: In the "monospace font" list,
there are just real monospace fonts plus the two mentioned above. None of the
three fonts lists lists _all_ fonts on my system.

Comment 7

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Reproduced on build 2000102008, Mac OS 9.0. Confirming.

Comment 8

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

*** Bug 113656 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

ftang?

Comment 10

[timeless]

The bug was morphed, but it seems pretty clear that we only list a fraction of
all fonts, and only the ones we think match. So the problem is that sometimes we
fail to figure out that a font doesn't belong, which would be what this bug was
filed about. Undoing most changes and resummarizing based on comment 0.

Reporter is this still reproducable?

Comment 11

[Oliver Klee]

I don't have those specific font on my system anymore as I had to re-install
Win2k a few months ago. In addition, I don't know from where I got those fonts.
Maybe someone knows a source?

So, I cannot reproduce the problem due to missing fonts---which does not really
mean the bug is WFM.

Comment 12

[Grey Hodge (jX)]

over 18 months since Timeless req'ed reporter for info, it's been proposed as
WFM by Hixie and WONTFIX by timeless. Marking WFM. If someone still sees this,
or cares, you can reopen it.