642839 - Font rendering issue on my.senecacollege.ca (Blackboard CMS)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Attachment: Fonts screenshot

Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Linux armv7l; rv:2.1) Gecko/20110318 Firefox/4.0b13pre
Fennec/4.0

This site used primarily for students and faculty for the campus looks pretty bad in Fennec. Although the layout is not that great, the text/font legibility on this site doesn't look right and is difficult to read. See screenshot and URL

Tested on HTC Nexus One, Android 2.3.3

Comment 1

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Note that other institutes using Blackboard CMS might run into the same issue

Comment 2

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Wow, that looks awful. It renders fine on my HTC Desire HD, however (Android 2.2).

Comment 3

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

On my Nexus One (2.3.3) the initial display looks like Aaaron's screenshot. If I try to pinch to zoom, the zoom doesn't really change, but the fonts do become more legible.

Comment 4

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

What can we do to start investigating the possible reasons for the illegible fonts?

Comment 5

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

I'm not sure where to start looking....

One observation, though: on my HTC device, the page looks fine when initially loaded, but if I rotate between portrait & landscape (or vice versa) the font quality visibly deteriorates. Reloading the page in the new orientation restores good-looking fonts.

Even the "bad" fonts I see after rotating aren't nearly as ugly as the screenshot here, but they do give a similar impression - looking a bit like text that was rendered at a different scale and then resampled.

I also notice that if I try to zoom (by pinching or double-tapping), the page does not actually zoom but the fonts do *deteriorate* in the same way as when I rotate. (This seems to be the opposite of comment #3.)

At this point, my guess is that the site is doing something weird that prevents zoom working as normal, and this is somehow also causing the font-resolution problem.

Comment 6

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

And another thing - the page refuses to scroll for me.

Comment 7

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

(In reply to Jonathan Kew from comment #6)
> And another thing - the page refuses to scroll for me.

bug 676910

Comment 8

[John Daggett (:jtd)]

(In reply to Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) from comment #4)
> What can we do to start investigating the possible reasons for the illegible
> fonts?

One thing to do would be to enable textrun logging of content, then dig through the log to see what sizes are being used.  My guess is that the sizes for the "bad" renderings is *very* small and the "good" ones are larger.  Just a hunch though.

export NSPR_LOG_MODULES=textrun:5
export NSPR_LOG_FILE=textruns.out

Note: this will dump a *lot* of data, so be sure to turn this on only for the pages you want to test.

If you're interested in chrome fonts, use textrunui:5 instead.