644930 - [D2D] text spacing and font problem on some windows systems

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[samik83]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0

Text spacing and font size are incorrect on some windows systems.

I have tested on 5 PC's so far. 3 of them display the pages correctly (all win 7 (64 and x86)) 2 of them have the problem (Vista x86 and Win 7 x86_64) Originally I had this problem on my work PC(Win 7 32bit)  also, but it got resolved after intalling beta 12. After that, no problems with any of the newer releases.

Heres a screen shot of the problem.
http://img715.imageshack.us/i/notworking.jpg/


Reproducible: Always




I have tested on 5 PC's so far. 3 of them display the pages correctly (all win 7 (64 and x86)) 2 of them have the problem (Vista x86 and Win 7 x86_64) Originally I had this problem on my work PC(Win 7 32bit)  also, but it got resolved after intalling beta 12. After that, no problems with any of the newer releases.

Heres a screen shot of the problem.
http://img715.imageshack.us/i/notworking.jpg/

Comment 1

[samik83]

EDIT: Tried updating the graphics driver on my notebook and now the problem reoccured. Graphic card is ATI radeon HD 3200

Comment 2

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

Fine for me using Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.2a1pre) Gecko/20110324 Firefox/4.2a1pre ID:20110324144234

Could you see if the issue occurs if using Firefox in safe mode:
http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Safe+Mode

How about with a new, empty testing profile? (Don't install any addons into it)
http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Basic+Troubleshooting#w_8-make-a-new-profile

Comment 3

[(mostly gone) XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall]]

Does setting "gfx.direct2d.disabled" to "true" via "about:config" and restarting Firefox show a Difference?

Comment 4

[samik83]

Thanks.

Works with safe mode and "gfx.direct2d.disabled" to "true".
New profile made no difference.

What does gfx.direct2d.true enable? Can I just leave it on?

Comment 5

[(mostly gone) XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall]]

It disables the Direct2D Part of the HW Acceleration. Moreover there's a Difference in Font Rendering in GDI vs. D2D/DW.
In Safemode all HW Acceleration is disabled in total.

Comment 6

[samik83]

It seems PDF files will not work when direct2d is disabled, but the overall performance is better when browsing. 

Is the font rendering in D2D a known bug?

Comment 7

[samik83]

Just found out that the problem only occurs when using font size 11 or bigger. 
Size 10 and smaller all work ok. Only tested with Arial so far.

Comment 8

[samik83]

Heres a simple example to exlude all other possible variables.
2 text blocks with Arial 10px and 11px with a picture aligned at the end of the text 

http://img705.imageshack.us/i/testhl.jpg/

Comment 9

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Could you please attach a minimal testcase that demonstrates the problem?

Comment 10

[samik83]

(In reply to comment #9)
> Could you please attach a minimal testcase that demonstrates the problem?

Not sure what your asking, the problem is presented in the picture in my last post. Arial 11px is rendered / postioned incorrectly so that the picture goes on top of the text. Below that is a picture under "in Web builder" from my WYSIWYG web builder to show how the picture and text should be aligned. 
heres the live site http://koneita.com/test/

The problem seems to accour only on certain graphics card drivers. 
On my lap top FF4 was rendering the text correctly untill I updated the graphics card driver. The driver was quite old from 2009. Version 8.632.1.2000
I updated it to the latest: 8.831.2.0 
It's an ATI HD 3200 card

Comment 11

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

I was wanting an example of the HTML that produced your "problem" screenshot - the "live site" URL is fine for that, thanks.

The problem in your example occurs because the text is in a <div> with a fixed height. This is a bad idea for any container filled with text, as you don't know exactly what the metrics of the text will be - this varies between platforms. It happens that DirectWrite/D2D may sometimes return different font metrics from GDI (and other platforms might also return different metrics; what if the user doesn't even have the Arial font installed, so gets a different fallback?).

Such layouts are inherently fragile and non-portable. Good web design should not rely on specific, platform-dependent font metrics, but should adapt to the metrics that are actually found and used by the user's browser.

Comment 12

[samik83]

Thanks for the reply.  

I've had an exchange today with the software developer of "WYSIWYG Web Builder", that I've used to build my site. I thought the problem might be with WB also, but he maintains that it's a bug in FF4. Heres a quote from him after I explained that my old site made in MS publisher 2007 works just fine in FF4.

"Pages created with MS publisher 2007 use table based layouts (not modern CSS), so the rest of the layout will adjust to the new size of the font in that case (moving them into a new position). Of course this is not possible in a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get web editor, because the whole point of such an editor is to position object absolute (exactly where you want them). This means that of the browser decides to render the font larger then this will cause problems in the layout.
There is no way to control how fonts are rendered in any browser. There is no HTML code that can force a browser to render text is a specific way. If there was we would have of course already buillt in into the software (just like we did nor IE)."

I'm not a web developer, barely got the basics, but I'd like to point out that IE 8/9, Chrome, Opera or Firefox 3.6 all work fine on my site. I've built my site by checking that it works on all of the major browser, only FF4 seems to cause problems on some setups.
Also theres the fact that my site worked fine with older graphics driver.

Comment 13

[samik83]

Any fix on this yet? After year and a half the same bug is still there. 
IE, Opera and Chrome still show my pages correctly, only Firefox has this problem.

Correction to my previous comment; Different graphics cards do not have an effect. I've been able to replicate the bug on multiple Windows pc's.

Comment 14

[Gregory Pappas [:gregp]]

Unable to reproduce in current versions.