Bizarre huge fonts in Firefox

[DaveAbrahams]

Every so often, the body fonts of most pages will become incredibly large. See the enclosed screenshot of this site.

 uname -a => Linux mcbain 2.6.24-16-generic #1 SMP Thu Apr 10 13:23:42 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

[Jared Buck (jared-buck)]

which version of firefox are you using? we need more information to pinpoint this problem.

[DaveAbrahams (boostpro)]

3.0b5 appears to be what Hardy installs; that's what my About box says.

[Jared Buck (jared-buck)]

well, you can check and see what your font size for firefox is - that's
found in Edit -> Preferences - Content tab. You might have messed up the
font size. I haven't had any problems with firefox 3.0b5 causing the
bizzare font issues on my system.

On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 8:41 AM, DaveAbrahams <email address hidden>
wrote:

> 3.0b5 appears to be what Hardy installs; that's what my About box says.
>
> --
> Bizarre huge fonts in Firefox
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/224471
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[DaveAbrahams (boostpro)]

No, my font size is not messed up.

It was set at 16, but changing it to 12 didn't affect anything I saw when looking at this bug's page. It appears to be a problem with Firefox's idea of what constitutes a "basic page style." When I choose View > Page Style > No Page Style, everything looks spare but normal and the page responds to my font size setting.

[DaveAbrahams (boostpro)]

Also note the "minimum font size" setting in this screenshot. It turns out that changing it to 9 doesn't affect what I see, but maybe this is a related issue.

[DaveAbrahams (boostpro)]

 this appears to have something to do with xrandr and single/multi-head switches.

I am using fglrx with the default configuration driving two 1600x1200 monitors (xrandr -s 0 => 3200x1200). When I undock my laptop I switch to xrandr -s 1 (1600x1200) and aticonfig --enable-monitor=lvds. When I re-dock, I enable the two heads and go back to xrandr -s 0.

When I start up Xorg from my docked configuration,
xpdyinfo reports a resolution of 99x98 dpi, but if I undock, then logout and log back in, xdpyinfo reports 135x139

[DaveAbrahams (boostpro)]

This can be worked around by setting DisplaySize in the Monitor section of xorg.conf, so there *may* be a bug somewhere else. Nonetheless, the fact remains that Firefox and Emacs are the only two programs I've seen respond this way.

[DaveAbrahams (boostpro)]

Apparently I was wrong; I'm still seeing the problem.
Check this shot of http://geekswithblogs.net/lorint/archive/2006/12/07/100596.aspx

[Marius Gedminas (mgedmin)]

I see this problem too. Occasionally parts of the web page becomes huge; I usually notice it here on launchpad.net (see screenshot). Before I saw this bug report I hadn't realized it's dual-head related.

I regularly switch between one screen configuration (14" widescreen laptop at 1280x800) and another (same plus an external 19" 1280x1024 LCD; combined to a 2560x1024 desktop) with xrandr (via the new Screen Resolution applet). The internal LCD is about 85 dpi, the external one about 75 dpi, and I've no idea what Firefox thinks the combined dpi is, but it is obviously wrong.

Fonts look fine in single-head mode but huge in dual-head mode. The font size change doesn't take effect immediately after an xrandr invocation, but only when I reload the page in Firefox.

[Marius Gedminas (mgedmin)]

I restarted Firefox and the fonts look sane now in dual-head mode. Could it be that Firefox remembers the physical screen size on startup and recalculates the DPI when the resolution changes without noticing that the physical screen size also changed?

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

On Thu, May 08, 2008 at 11:01:29AM -0000, Marius Gedminas wrote:
> I restarted Firefox and the fonts look sane now in dual-head mode.
> Could it be that Firefox remembers the physical screen size on startup
> and recalculates the DPI when the resolution changes without noticing
> that the physical screen size also changed?
>

Could you please provide the output of running

  xdpyinfo | grep resolut

and

  gconftool-2 --get /desktop/gnome/font_rendering/dpi

on the terminal.

 status incomplete

 - Alexander

[DaveAbrahams (boostpro)]

* I get "resolution: 97x96 dots per inch", and
* 96

This is with my laptop disconnected from everything, single-head

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 01:25:29PM -0000, DaveAbrahams wrote:
> * I get "resolution: 97x96 dots per inch", and
> * 96
>
> This is with my laptop disconnected from everything, single-head
>
> ** Changed in: firefox (Ubuntu)
> Status: Incomplete => Confirmed
>

you didn't provide all info i asked for. please keep it incomplete. we
will confirm it once we feel that there is enough information
available to deal with this issues.

 status incomplete

Thanks,

 - Alexander

[DaveAbrahams (boostpro)]

AFAICT I did provide all the info you asked for. Maybe you didn't understand that "96" is the result of the 2nd command. If I am still missing something, please be specific about what I should provide.

Thanks,
Dave

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 04:09:55PM -0000, DaveAbrahams wrote:
> AFAICT I did provide all the info you asked for. Maybe you didn't
> understand that "96" is the result of the 2nd command. If I am still
> missing something, please be specific about what I should provide.
>

OK, sorry. the dpi settings look ok.

what fonts have you selected in firefox preferences and in gnome font
preferences?

 status incomplete

 - Alexander

[DaveAbrahams (boostpro)]

My FF preferences are the default AFAIK:

Default font: serif Size: 16
Fonts for: Western:
Proportional: Serif (note uppercase) Size: 16
Serif: serif (note lowercase)
Sans-serif: serif
Monospace: monospace Size: 12

Minimum font size: 9

"Allow pages to choose their own fonts" is ticked
Default character encoding: Western (ISO-8859-1)

My Font settings in the Appearance panel:

Application font, Document font, Desktop font all set to "Sans"
Window title font set to "Sans Bold"
Fixed width font set to "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono Roman"
All 10 point

Subpixel smoothing is turned on.

Probably there are some config files somewhere you could ask for that would supply more accurate/complete info.

[destrius (destrius)]

Hi, I'm experiencing similar problems on my system. The problem seems to be with fonts that have their sizes specified in points (pt); fonts where the size is specified using px, em, or a percentage are fine. I suspect this issue is related to what Firefox thinks the current screen resolution is, which is uses to calculate how big a point is.

Setting the config value layout.css.dpi to "96" using "about:config" fixes this issue, further pointing to some resolution info mismatch. However in my case xdpyinfo reports a resolution of 192x205 dpi... so that might be the underlying cause of the issues I'm having. I'm running under VMWare btw.

Xinyu

[sleon (rysu2fp02)]

Same problem here using 64-bit Hardy and Firefox 3b5, all updates applied. Two 20" monitors each 1600x1200. NVidia restricted drivers using Twinview with absolute settings (+0+0 and +1600+0).

Here's the output from requested commands earlier in thread:
"resolution: 198x98 dots per inch"
"96"

As I type this, the font size is huge. So that output reflects the current state.

Let me know what further info would be helpful and I'll do my best to help.

[sleon (rysu2fp02)]

Sorry, somehow I missed destrius' message above before posting mine.

I checked layout.css.dpi and it said "-1". Changing it to "96" immediately fixed everything. Every page on every tab looks perfect now.

As a test, setting it back to -1 reverts each page to exactly the way it looked with huge fonts.

[Marcus Uddenhed (marcus-swedcore)]

Hi.

Have the same problem and setting the layout.css.dpi to 96 fixed it for me to.

Info from me:

xdpyinfo | grep resolut = resolution: 147x145 dots per inch
gconftool-2 --get /desktop/gnome/font_rendering/dpi = 96

Default font: serif Size: 14
Fonts for: Western
Proportional: Sans Serif (note uppercase) Size: 14
Serif: serif (note lowercase)
Sans-serif: sans-serif
Monospace: monospace Size: 10

Minimum font size: None

"Allow pages to choose their own fonts" is ticked
Default character encoding: Western (ISO-8859-1)

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