FS#4663 - firefox/thunderbird font problems

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by Yi Qiang (yi) - Friday, 19 May 2006, 20:27 GMT
Last edited by arjan timmerman (blaasvis) - Saturday, 20 May 2006, 08:52 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category System
Status Closed
Assigned To Jan de Groot (JGC)
Architecture not specified
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version 0.7.1 Noodle
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

Ever since the locale changes (using /etc/locale.conf, locale-gen, etc) I have been running into weird issues with fonts in firefox and thunderbird. Some fonts seem to show up as a 'block' that contains some numbers in them. I think the screenshots will explain clearly what I mean. Notice that this problem doesn't only happen in firefox/thunderbird, it also happens in browsers like epiphany, although it is non-existent in something like konqueror. Perhaps someone can shed light on what could cause this. Also, this problem doesn't appear in other distributions I use at home/work.
   2006-05-19-132243_1600x1200_s... (355.2 KiB)
   2006-05-19-132528_1600x1200_s... (271.3 KiB)
This task depends upon

Closed by  Jan de Groot (JGC)
Friday, 13 October 2006, 19:53 GMT
Reason for closing:  Fixed
Additional comments about closing:  Bitmap fonts are enabled again. With fontconfig 2.4.1-2, they don't even look terrible anymore either (they're overriden when possible by sans/sans-serif/monospace aliases)
Comment by 甘露(Lu Gan) (ganlu) - Friday, 19 May 2006, 23:08 GMT
What's your locale? You may reference here to see if it solves your problem (in Chinese):
http://www.linuxsir.org/bbs/showthread.php?t=231724
Comment by Yi Qiang (yi) - Friday, 19 May 2006, 23:50 GMT
My locale is en_US.utf8, those instructions are probably not relevant to this problem.
Comment by 甘露(Lu Gan) (ganlu) - Saturday, 20 May 2006, 15:31 GMT
I have same locale here, but the point is local.conf. Please look at its content.
Comment by Jan de Groot (JGC) - Saturday, 20 May 2006, 17:53 GMT
Those chinese signs look perfect on my system, though I have quite some bad character boxes on quite some pages with mozilla, epiphany or whatever mozilla-based browser.
Comment by Yi Qiang (yi) - Saturday, 20 May 2006, 18:30 GMT
Yes fine, I can understand if it doesn't work with chinese characters. But why is it happening on english sites (i.e. thefacebook)? Or in thunderbird with english emails?

Comment by Jan de Groot (JGC) - Saturday, 20 May 2006, 19:06 GMT
The chinese characters DO work in my situation. The point with facebook is that they use weird unicode characters where they could have used normal characters. I see weird boxes appearing on some sites where the "curly quotes" are used too. I'd like to have a fix for this, but to get a fix, I have to know more about what is actually screwing up here.
Comment by Yi Qiang (yi) - Saturday, 20 May 2006, 21:24 GMT
Ok great, we're getting somewhere. How can I provide you with more information? I am more than willing to help debug this.
Comment by Jan de Groot (JGC) - Tuesday, 06 June 2006, 07:24 GMT
Most fonts don't have the correct charsets included, so these show up as bad. Fontconfig will fallback to any font that has the glyphs, but most of these fonts happen to be bitmap fonts, which are disabled by a fontconfig rule in /etc/fonts/conf.d.

I will try to get TTF fonts as high-priority when selecting a font for common fontnames and when these don't have the required glyphs, it should fallback to bitmap fonts then.
Comment by Yi Qiang (yi) - Friday, 09 June 2006, 00:39 GMT
That sounds like a reasonable way to fix it, thanks Jan.

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