646403 - Bad kerning with uppercase Arial bold e.g "NTA" under Windows XP

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, defect)

Description

[Thorsten Walenta]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0

Every word with an T written in ARIAL by using uppercase is not correctly rendered. for instance the word STARTSEITE or KONTAKT. This problem doesn't occure in version 3.6

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. When i write a word including a big T using Arial
2.
3.

Comment 1

[j.j.]

Kernig (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unterschneidung_(Typografie))
is enabled by default im Fx4 (bug 595688, I think)
Ant thats not only a problem of Arial.

Is there a way to control this with CSS properties like
"-moz-font-feature-settings" or with "text-rendering" ?

See also bug 595688

Comment 2

[j.j.]

Attachment: testcase

Comment 3

[Thorsten Walenta]

the render or kerning error occures if the font-size is bigger than 13px. i only can reproduce this fact when i use arial (regular or bold)

Comment 4

[j.j.]

Attachment: testcase with more fonts

Same issue with Trebuchet.

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Does the problem go away if you turn off harfbuzz?

Comment 6

[al_9x]

(In reply to Boris Zbarsky (:bz) from comment #5)
> Does the problem go away if you turn off harfbuzz?

Currently, turning off harfbuzz introduces a different set of spacing regressions
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=639185#c23

There needs to be an OS and/or font kerning exception list.  Many xp fonts were never intended to be rendered with kerning.

Bug 690917 - meta bug for xp kerning issues