90792 - Mail/News display font is not changeable via Pref setting

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Internationalization, defect, P3)

Description

[Katsuhiko Momoi]

** Observed with 7/13/2001 Win32 build on Win 2000 US/JPN locale set **

I don't know exactly how this problem started. It feels like it started
when I changed some font setting for Japanese recently. 

I have my Mail Pref display set to use the fixed font. 
For Japanese I have MS Gothic set for Monospaced font. 

For some reason, the display for Japanese is currently using

Andale Mono WT J  or
Arial Unicode MS

fonts. (They are both a large Unicode fonts)

I tried re-setting my Monospaced, Serif and Sans-serif font 
categories many times but to no avail. No setting changes
actually changes the display font.

I looked at a recent build on ji's NT4-J. She does not
seem to have this problem. 

I hope that this problem is reproducible among the people I CC'ed.
If not, I need to hunt down exact conditions which induce this problem.
So your help is highly appreciated. if this problem is 
widely reproducible, we should really fix this problem.

Comment 1

[Katsuhiko Momoi]

OK, I now understand what produces this bug.

1. On my Win 2000 US version, I had it originally
set the locale to Japanese. And created the profile
I use for Mozilla builds. I see the font names in
Japanese rather than in English, e.g. MS ƒSƒVƒbƒN,
in the font pref panel.
2. Recently I changed the locale to US English
and then later I thought I changed it back to Japanese.
3. It turns out that I did not change it back to Japanese.

This seems to be the reason why the font name "MS ƒSƒVƒbƒN"
was not recognized and not found in Mail display. (View this
name under Japanese (Shift_JIS) encoding.)

What is so strange about this is that the Browser 
display found the correct font but Mail display did not.

So, I found 2 workarounds to this problem:

1. Change the order of fonts in ...default\pref\winpref.js:

pref("font.name.serif.ja", "‚l‚r ‚o–¾’©"); // "MS PMincho"
pref("font.name.sans-serif.ja", "‚l‚r ‚oƒSƒVƒbƒN"); // "MS PGothic"
pref("font.name.monospace.ja", "‚l‚r ƒSƒVƒbƒN"); // "MS Gothic"
pref("font.name.serif.ja.1", "MS PMincho"); // "MS PMincho"
pref("font.name.sans-serif.ja.1", "MS PMincho"); // "MS PGothic"
pref("font.name.monospace.ja.1", "MS Gothic"); // "MS Gothic"

If we change ".ja" to ".ja.1" and ".ja.1" to .ja, this makes the
English font names the primary and so Mozilla can find the
default fonts rather than going down the Alphabetical listing
of non-system fonts.

2. Change the locale back to Japanese without changing the
   winpref.js file.


Note that the Browser display had no problem. 
Note also that the font names displayed in the font
pref window were in Japanese rather than in English.
Normally under the true non-Japanese locale setting, 
you will see English font names for Japanese rather
than Japanese font names. So something went wrong here. 

The problem was caused by my swicthing locales, but I 
am inclined to think that there is a bug here.

A. The default font names should have been in English 
    rather than in Japanese. And the fonts should have been
    found for Mail display. I did not change the font
    names from the default ones originally and these
    fonts were read in from ...default\pref\winpref.js
    file.

B. There was no problem for Browser display in using the
    default system fonts specifiedin winpref.js. Mail could 
    not use them for some reason. This could be a mail-specific bug.

Given the foregoing facts, I am going to reduce the severity
to normal. But I think when we have time, we should find out
why this problem happens.

Comment 2

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

It this a regression? If so, it might be a dup of bug 76359.

Comment 3

[nhottanscp]

This looks similar to bug 102623 but under more specific condition.

Comment 4

[nhottanscp]

Momoi san, can you still reproduce with the latest trunk?

Comment 5

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

ssu might be working on this bug.

he's going to copy the font pref UI for browser over to mail, and then fix it so
we heed the mail versions of these prefs.

see bug 30896

Comment 6

[ji]

QA contact to Marina. Thanks.