701040 - Font size preference ineffectual in Thunderbird 8; size 10 is used despite settings

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[Brian Hauer]

Attachment: Message composition showing size-10 font despite size-16 preference

I just updated from Thunderbird version 6 to version 8.  The font size preference is now ineffectual.

After the upgrade to version 8, my pre-existing preference of size-16 fonts was retained, but the effectiveness of it was lost.  Thunderbird now uses size-10 for all message bodies, both plaintext (fixed-width font) and rich text/HTML (proportional font).  Setting the preferences to an absurdly large size has no effect; the font size preference is simply ignored and size-10 is used regardless.

I am able to work around the issue for message reading by adjusting the zoom level using Control-+.  However, the message composition window does not have a comparable zoom control, meaning it is limited to the frustratingly small font size.  I will attach a screen-grab for reference.

Note that following a restart of Thunderbird, the display of fixed-width fonts for plaintext messages was restored to my preferred font size, but rich text/HTML messages remain at size-10.

Comment 1

[Brian Hauer]

Attachment: Size 48 == size 10

This is simply demonstrating that even extreme selections have no effect.

Comment 2

[Brian Hauer]

It occurs to me that this could be and very likely is caused by the T2EMBED.DLL "workaround" that Microsoft pushed out for the Duqu problem.

Comment 3

[Hashem Masoud]

(In reply to Brian Hauer from comment #1)
> Created attachment 573219 [details]
> Size 48 == size 10
> 
> This is simply demonstrating that even extreme selections have no effect.

Agreed. Ctrl-+ & Ctrl-- are effective in changing fonts of already sent or received e-mails. Setting the font size through Preferences are effective only against e-mails created after the change.

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:8.0) Gecko/20111105 Thunderbird/8.0
Build ID: 20111105021619

Comment 4

[Brian Hauer]

Since Microsoft has finally issued a patch for the TrueType vulnerability (see http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/12/microsoft-squashes-duqu-threat-with-windows-patch.ars for more details), I have rolled back the t2embed.dll workaround and rebooted.

Unfortunately, Thunderbird 8 is still rendering all proportional fonts as Arial 10pt and is ignoring my font preferences.

Frankly, I am astonished that so many people ignored the t2embed.dll workaround since, as that article cites Microsoft, "the vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted document or visits a malicious Web page that embeds TrueType font files."

But it seems few people were affected.  Thank goodness, I guess.  But I'm left here not sure how to restore normal font sizing to Thunderbird.

I've confirmed that t2embed.dll is re-enabled by visiting web pages that embed fonts and using the Office 2010 Save-as-PDF function (both of which had also been crippled by the t2embed.dll workaround).  Both work fine now post-patch.

Comment 5

[Brian Hauer]

Follow-up: Digging a little deeper, I was able to partially work-around this issue by using about:config.

It turns out that despite everything I had specified in the UI, font.size.fixed.x-western was still showing up as "10" and font.name.monospace.x-western was set to "Fixedsys".  In the UI, I had specified the minimum font size and all other font size settings to 16; the monospace font I had selected was Consolas.  But these were not taking effect despite repeated attempts and repeated restarts.

Using about:config, I changed font.size.fixed.x-western to "16" and font.name.monospace.x-western to "Consolas" and restarted Thunderbird.  Now things look mostly correct.  It still seems that Arial is being used as the default proportional font (rather than Calibri, which is what font.name.sans-serif.x-western is set to).  But at least everything is rendered at size 16.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Brian, Hashem,
Do you still see this problem when using a current version?

Comment 7

[Joe Sabash [:JoeS1]]

Seems to be wfm on current trunk and win7