strange fonts in firefox

[Matthew East]

In Breezy's firefox, some of the fonts look bad, they are small and it is
difficult to distinguish between regular text and bold text. This is not a
problem in Hoary. I don't know anything about fonts so please ask for more
information if necessary! I have the problem on both my breezy machines, someone
else _must_ have seen it!

Matt

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

I haven't seen it here, and there are no other reports...what do these systems
have in common that might not be true for other Breezy systems?

[Matthew East (mdke)]

I'm not sure: both systems are laptops, one with a default colony 2 install,
another with a hoary->breezy dist-upgrade with nothing changed.

Setting the minimum font size to 12 helps, could this be related to:
http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7196 ?

[Matthew East (mdke)]

forgot to mention: the resolution on both machines is 1024x768. Not sure if this
helps!

[Ernst Persson (ernstp)]

sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig
and setting the hinting to autohinter helps a lot here.
now bold and normal fonts are different in for example Gmail at small sizes.

and of cource, you can experiment with the settings in the gnome font
control panel, under "Details..."

[Matthew East (mdke)]

yes, this has helped a good deal. Thanks! However, this really should be working
out of the box in my opinion.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

(In reply to comment #5)
> yes, this has helped a good deal. Thanks! However, this really should be working
> out of the box in my opinion.

And it does, for me and others. If it isn't for you, then we need to find out why.

[Matthew East (mdke)]

sure, I understand that. Let me know how I can help!

[era (era+ubuntu)]

A screen shot or two would sound to me like a good idea.

[Paul M Edwards (paul-m-edwards)]

Created an attachment (id=3615)
Screenshot-Weird-Firefox-fonts.png

[Paul M Edwards (paul-m-edwards)]

Is the attached png what you're talking about?
Because that's what I'm seeing.

SysInfo: Linux 2.6.12-8-k7 | AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+ 1004.917 MHz |
Bogomips: 1988.42 | Mem: 686/1012M [||||||||||] | Diskspace: 0.56G Free: 0.41G |
Procs: 110 | Uptime: 2 days 20 hrs 34 mins | Load: 0.88 1.20 1.02 | Screen: ATI
Technologies Inc Radeon RV250 If [Radeon 9000] (rev 01) @ 2560x1024 (24 bpp) |
eth1: In: 2.76G Out: 667.70M

Diskspace reported above is wrong.
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VG0-System
                      148G 3.2G 137G 3% /
tmpfs 507M 0 507M 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 507M 13M 494M 3% /lib/modules/2.6.12-8-k7/volatile
/dev/sda2 89M 18M 66M 22% /boot
/dev/mapper/VG0-Home 45G 1.2G 42G 3% /home
zion:/mnt/aux 147G 107G 34G 77% /mnt/aux
zion:/var/www/html 5.0G 599M 4.1G 13% /mnt/websites
/dev/hdc 2.0G 2.0G 0 100% /media/cdrom1
/dev/sdd1 484M 132M 352M 28% /media/CARD

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

Do you have an LCD? It looks like it might be a subpixel rendering problem

[Paul M Edwards (paul-m-edwards)]

No, I'm running dual 17" CRTs.

And as you can see on the right side, and really anything that's not the gecko
rendering area, the fonts are fine.

[Matthew East (mdke)]

Created an attachment (id=3621)
screenshot

OK here is a screenshot which shows the problems I'm having. This is a shot of
my inbox: the bottom three emails are read and are thus in normal font, the
rest are unread and are thus in bold font. As you can see, it's extremely
difficult to distinguish between them. Hope this helps!

[Matthew East (mdke)]

(looks like it might be a different problem to yours, Paul)

[Paul M Edwards (paul-m-edwards)]

Created an attachment (id=3622)
Screenshot-Firefox-Bugzilla.png

I am seeing both actually.
Depends on the font/size used on the page.

[Paul M Edwards (paul-m-edwards)]

Created an attachment (id=3623)
Screenshot-Firefox-Bugzilla2.png

I have resolved the small fonts issue by selecting a different monospace font.

I've noticed that changing the sans serif font helps a bit, but doesn't fully
resolve the issue in my first screenshot.

[Ian Jackson (ijackson)]

Can you tell me what changes you have to make to your profile to get it to do this ?

Start with a fresh profile by moving .mozilla aside and then take a note of what
you change in the font preferences.

Also, could you please provide the output of dpkg -l '*firefox*'.

Thanks,

[Matthew East (mdke)]

Closing this bug as the fonts in firefox breezy/dapper are both fine on my system.