91843 - Context menus using the wrong font in Classic skin on Mac OS

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: Themes, defect)

Description

[Andrew Thompson]

On Mac OS 9 (shouldalso be true on OS X, not tested yet) using build 2001072008
from the trunk, the Classic skin uses completely inapproriate fonts for XP Menus.

To reproduce:

1/ ctrl-click to bring up a context menu

2/ or enable the bookmarks menu on the personal toolbar and open it

3/ or add a folder to the personal toolbar, but some bookmarks in it and open it.

You'll see the menu uses a very small font, rather than the System font for
drawing menus. Somewhere the CSS-2 value "Menu" needs to be used for the font,
so Mozilla will use the user's correct font. This is usually Charcoal on Mac OS
8/9 and a Lucida variant on Mac OS X, but the user may have changed it, so
hardcoding will not work. 

In the Bookmarks menu you'll also see that the font does not have the
appropriate glyphs to represent the Command or Shift keys, hence these appear as
little boxes (to see the correct effect, use the modern skin).

This is why I say the current font is completely inappropriate. Its not just
aethetically wrong, it doesn't have the right characters to do the job.


This regression has been around for about a month, but I can't find a duplicate.

Comment 1

[Andrew Thompson]

Is this related to bug 59892 ?

Comment 2

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

The font used for (2) and (3) are entirely appropriate -- compare with the font
used for the equivalent menus in 4.x for Mac (4.77 or higher) or Internet
Explorer 5.0, or for the Back and Forward menus used in either browser, or for
the What's Related menu in 4.x.

It is true that the Bookmarks menu in the Personal Toolbar shouldn't be trying
to use the Command symbol; filed bug 92794 for that.

So the remaining issue is (1) ... Resummarizing and hoping I don't get lynched.
(This, by the way, is another of the bugs that would be fixed if bug 34572 was
implemented. Hint, hint.)

Comment 3

[Andrew Thompson]

Matthew I feel we're over the line that divides comments that you can back up 
with concrete examples and design guidelines and onto the side which constitutes 
your opinion on the matter.

Some counter points:

* Who said that menu should not be consistent with the bookmarks menu in the main 
Menubar?

* The smaller font is harder to read.

* The smaller font makes it harder to select items, especially when we need to 
navigate into sub menus.

* The smaller font implies there's no room to place icons in the menu (will make 
it harder to support custom icons for each site).

* The smaller font means XPMenus can never support keyboard shortcuts as the 
small fonts don't have the required glyphs, nor are they likely to in future.

* If we do have 2 access points for the Bookmarks menu, what benefit is there for 
them looking completely different to each other? Surely this is confusing?

* IE 5.1 on Mac OS X uses the large system font for the back and forward items.

I'm not changing the summary back as I don't want to get into a slanging match, 
but I really don't agree with your assessment.

Comment 4

[Andrew Thompson]

Phew! Caught me in a wound-up mood. Didn't mean to offend anyone...

I'm playing with Fizilla for the first time since April, and its an eye opener
how much better its become. Wow!

On this subject, I'd like to add that the small menu font being used on Mac OS X
does have the required glyphs, so I'll eat my words on that part of what I said.

However, the menus with icons in them look *awful* with the small font. Its not
just the Bookmarks menu in the personal toolbar Matthew - there's also the File
Message and Mark Message menu buttons in Messenger. Although I'm kinda inclined
to agree with you about Bookmarks on the personal toolbar being unnecessary, and
 I can see the argument for it no having the "Add Bookmark" and "File Bookmark"
options, that still leaves these legitimate menu buttons.

I'll attach screenshots from Mac OS X. I suspect the Mac OS 9 versions of these
menus look even worse, as the keyboard accelerators will be little empty boxes.

I feel the small font only works in iconless menus, is very poor on menus with
submenus, and doesn't work at all on Mac OS 9 due to missing glyphs. I'd prefer
  we use the large menu font for these reasons.

Comment 5

[Andrew Thompson]

Attachment: File message menu on Mac OS X

Comment 6

[Andrew Thompson]

Attachment: Mark Message menu on Mac OS X

Comment 7

[Joe Hewitt (gone)]

mac classic -> andreww

Comment 8

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

> * Who said that menu should not be consistent with the bookmarks menu in the
> main Menubar?

Its parent item did -- the toolbar button, which uses the same font (bug 59892).

To see why this is important, consider a toolbar which contains the following items:
+---------------------------------------------------+
|[Georgia     :^][ 12:^] [B][I][U] [##:^] [Insert v]|___
+-----------------------------------------| Picture ... |
                                          | Applet ...  |
                                          | Object ...  |
                                           """""""""""""
There's two types of menu button here: popup menus (typeface, size, color) and
pulldown menus (Insert). All the menu buttons use the small font, because
they're in a toolbar (as they would if they were in a groupbox or a floating
window). And the popup menus (typeface and size) should use exactly the same
font as their parent buttons, because if they didn't then bug 52106 couldn't be
fixed properly. If the large system font was used for the `Insert' pull-down
menu, however, not only would the font for the menu be inconsistent with the
font for the menu's own title, it would also be inconsistent with all the other
menus on the toolbar.

If menus look bad in the small system font, then so does anything else in the
small font -- toolbar buttons, thread pane, whatever. It appears that Lucida
Grande doesn't look quite as good as Geneva does at small sizes, but that's
really a problem for Apple to worry about rather than us. And I maintain that no
menus, other than those in the main menu bar, should be displaying keyboard
shortcuts and thus having the glyph problem.

Comment 9

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

This was fixed by the Classic rewrite. Worksforme build 2001122508, Mac OS 9.1.