633128 - "Helvetica" font not correctly rendered on Linux

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(support.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[Underpass]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; it; rv:1.9.2.14) Gecko/20110207 Firefox/3.6.14
Build Identifier: 

Hello,

It took for me some time to understand why the page

https://support.mozilla.com/it/localization

presented all the articles links with a different font - and in the past few days, upon updating some libraries of my Debian box, the writings were utterly unreadable (only some pixels were visible).

The problem was due to a font named Helvetica referenced in this CSS

https://support.mozilla.com/media/css/wiki-min.css

Now, this font may be part of the distribution but is a bitmapped font (from what I understood searching the web), and bitmapped fonts are not enabled by default. Even if I enable them, the font is all smeared.

So I ask: would it be possible to substitute this font with something more common, like Arial or Verdana?

(see: https://support.mozilla.com/it/forums/contributors/704984)

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[James Socol [:jsocol, :james]]

Simone, can you get a screenshot of the issue?

Anyone else on Linux reproduce? It looks fine to me on Fedora 12/latest Minefield.

Comment 2

[[:Cww]]

I can't reproduce but I'm a font nerd and have all fonts all the time!

Helvetica is available as OpenType, TrueType and Postscript like everything else.  It's a standard font on Mac and you can pay for it (it can be rather pricey to get the full collection) for Windows and Linux (IIRC).  There are a number of free and shady Helvetica fonts out there that people download but they're sometimes (quite often) missing glyphs or may not be properly vectorized (and a particularly bad one from China is actually a security vulnerability).  I think you just have a bad font.

Resolving WFM, please check and clean up your fonts (usually in /etc/fonts and then run sudo fc-cache from the commandline.

Comment 3

[Underpass]

I did all and everything I could, the only way I managed to solve the problem is by adding this code to ~/.fonts.conf

</match>
<match target="pattern">
<test qual="any" name="family">
<string>Helvetica</string>
</test>
<edit name="family" mode="assign">
<string>Verdana</string>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>

Now, if for you this is not a problem, then can you please tell it clearly?
Thanks.