FS#10838 - Upgrade screws up Firefox fonts

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by name withheld (Gullible Jones) - Sunday, 06 July 2008, 21:24 GMT
Last edited by Greg (dolby) - Monday, 07 July 2008, 12:15 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category Packages: Extra
Status Closed
Assigned To No-one
Architecture All
Severity High
Priority Normal
Reported Version 2007.08-2
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

Description:

With the latest versions of fontconfig, freetype2, etc., some fonts in Firefox are not rendered properly. Many letters can be seen to touch each other, and the thickness of letters varies a lot. See this screenshot (examples of errors are underlined in red):

http://img389.imageshack.us/img389/7577/fontseg2.png

Outside of Firefox, the fonts look fine, better than before the upgrade in fact.


Additional info:
* fontconfig 2.6.0-1, freetype2 2.3.7-1, libxfont 1.3.2-1
* default font configuration, autohinting enabled (but no subpixel)

Steps to reproduce:

Upgrade to fontconfig 2.6.0 and go to the Arch Linux forums. Fonts
This task depends upon

Closed by  Greg (dolby)
Monday, 07 July 2008, 12:15 GMT
Reason for closing:  Fixed
Comment by name withheld (Gullible Jones) - Sunday, 06 July 2008, 21:32 GMT
Update: the issue appears to be with the rendering of type1 fonts, Dejavu Sans and other truetype fonts are rendered properly. For now switching to all truetype fonts should be a good workaround.
Comment by Jan de Groot (JGC) - Sunday, 06 July 2008, 21:39 GMT
The Helvetica/Times/Courier font replacement configuration has changed to use Microsoft or Liberation fonts instead of plain Sans/Serif/Monospace. I can see characters touching eachother on the bugtracker with bold fonts, so it looks like bold fonts are screwed up at small sizes for some fonts.
Comment by Jan de Groot (JGC) - Sunday, 06 July 2008, 21:54 GMT
Renaming 30-replace-bitmap-fonts.conf to 29-replace-bitmap-fonts.conf makes the bugtracker look normal again. The 30-metric-aliases.conf file is changing font associations to take postscript fonts, so the 30-replace-bitmap-fonts.conf file doesn't make any sense anymore then.
Comment by Jan de Groot (JGC) - Sunday, 06 July 2008, 22:14 GMT
Fixed in fontconfig 2.6.0-2. 30-replace-bitmap-fonts.conf has been renamed to 29-replace-bitmap-fonts.conf.
Nimbus doesn't look so good, not with Freetype 2.3.7, not with Freetype 2.3.6 or 2.3.5. This font looks weird at small sizes on many versions of Freetype. We've just worked around the problem by switching to a different size-compatible font.

Loading...