Hinting: menu underline too thick in Firefox

[Leonidas Arvanitis]

The underline bellow accelerator characters in Firefox and Thunderbird menus and pop-ups are very thick when using the Ubuntu font (see attached screenshot).

Comments:
* This doesn't happen with any other font I've tried (DejaVu Sans, Arial, Trebuchet MS to name a few).

* The Gtk engine used doesn't change anything (tried QtCurve and Raleigh).

* This doesn't happen in any other gtk application I've tested (Inkscape, Gimp, Chrome, OpenOffice suite).

My System:
(K)Ubuntu 10.10
Ubuntu-Font 0.69+ufl-0ubuntu1
Firefox 3.6.12+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.10.10.1
KDE 4.5.3
Qt 4.7.0
Gtk2 "the one that comes with Ubuntu 10.10"

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

I don't see this in Firefox or Thunderbird, what else could be the
cause? Which theme engine are you using?

Mark

[Matthias Brandt (mattelacchiato)]

I'm having the same problem here. In other gtk-Applications like Eclipse, Pidgin, etc every menu underscore is correct. Only in Firefox (3.6.12) and Thunderbird (3.1.6) all underscores are double thick as normal.

[Leonidas Arvanitis (larvan)]

I tried Archlinux and it still happens.

I also tried new firefox user without success.

There must be something wrong with the font.

Not sure if it's relevant but I have an nvidia GTX 470 using the binary driver (tried latest 256.x and 260.x)

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

I suspect that this is a hinting issue with the dimensions of the underline at certain sizes.

[David Marshall (dave-daltonmaag)]

Underlining, rather than the underscore character, isn't in the control
of the hint code. What it could be is a rounding issue - it's rounding
up to two pixels thick sooner than we think it should.

Dave

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

I too have different font rendering (in my case, hinting) in Firefox+Thunderbird than in every other Ubuntu app, and no-one has ever figured out why.

Anyway, as David implied, this is not a problem with the Ubuntu font, since the font doesn't do underlining. It's more likely to be a problem with Pango.