894246 - Font rendering issue with accented characters on Windows 7 on mozilla.org

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(www.mozilla.org :: Pages & Content, defect, P3)

Description

[Théo Chevalier]

Attachment: Rendering differences between Ubuntu 13.04 and Windows 7

There is a font rendering issue on Windows on https://www-dev.allizom.org/b/fr/

See the attached screenshot, you can see the difference with Ubuntu for accented characters like û, é, è, ê. Those are really difficult to read on Windows. Actually, you can't even make the difference between é and è.

This probably affects a lot of locales.

Comment 1

[Steven Garrity [:sgarrity]]

I've done some initial debugging on this and it seems to be related to the particular instance of the OpenSans webfont we're including here:

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/blob/master/media/css/sandstone/fonts.less#L16

If I replace our include of this copy of the Open Sans font with a copy loading from the google.com/webfonts service, the accents render much more clearly. I wonder if our copy of OpenSans doesn't have the hinting required on windows at the 12px size?

Still digging. Stay tuned.

Comment 2

[Steven Garrity [:sgarrity]]

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/pull/1074

This PR updates the copy of OpenSans from fontsquirrel.com (where the previous version came from). I'm not sure what changed or why, but this copy avoids the accent rendering issues in Windows.

Unfortunately, though, this version is also larger (file size).

Comment 3

[[github robot]]

Commit pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/5806e5ae6907c49111c367e9a173de285d748202
Update OpenSans webfont from fontsquirrel
Bug 894246

Comment 4

[Théo Chevalier]

That's funny, it is fixed on the dev server, but not on the production one :)

With IE 11 on W7:

https://www-dev.allizom.org/fr/ -> fixed

https://www.mozilla.org/fr/ -> affected

Of course, I cleared the "Internet temporary files" folder, and someone else confirmed that font rendering was bad on WinXP with IE8.

Comment 5

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

CDN issue caching the old fonts ?

Comment 6

[Steven Garrity [:sgarrity]]

(In reply to Pascal Chevrel-PTO-untilSept09:pascalc from comment #5)
> CDN issue caching the old fonts ?

Yeah, probably. I've submitted a pull request to cache-bust the IE fonts: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/pull/1184

Comment 7

[[github robot]]

Commits pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/dc1bc727c7385b79acbe01242b2b6f0037c470b2
Bug 894246: Update webfont CSS
 - Cache-bust Open Sans fonts
 - drop SVN include
 - drop extra .eot
These changes are based on http://www.fontspring.com/blog/the-new-bulletproof-font-face-syntax

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/268b8b668172fc2845ca37583f823f6d585e36c2
Merge pull request #1184 from sgarrity/bug-894246-font-cache

Bug 894246: Cache-bust Open Sans fonts for IE

Comment 8

[Rebecca Billings [:rbillings]]

Verified language display on https://www-dev.allizom.org/b/fr/, using Win 7 [on FF & Chrome]

Comment 9

[raymond [:retornam] (inactive)]

fixed on stage https://www.allizom.org/fr/