some weird font garbling when selecting text in firefox

[gniger]

If you select any text in a line on certain pages, some characters, particularly the last character in the line, are slightly mutilated. This has happened to me on several websites such as slashdot, and occurs mainly with the letter 'r' and the quotation mark. Screenshots demonstrating the problem are below. This is in firefox 1.5 in dapper. I was unable to reproduce this behavior in debian unstable's firefox version, which leads me to believe it is specific to ubuntu.

http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/6756/screenshot21cq.png
http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/8135/screenshot34yd.png

[gniger (leeper)]

Note in particular the quotation mark at the end of the paragraph. The mutilation of the 'r' is harder to see, but go ahead and play around with selecting text on slashdot, and hopefully you'll get the same results I did.

[Ian Jackson (ijackson)]

gniger writes ("[Bug 30908] some weird font garbling when selecting text in firefox"):
> Note in particular the quotation mark at the end of the paragraph. The
> mutilation of the 'r' is harder to see, but go ahead and play around
> with selecting text on slashdot, and hopefully you'll get the same
> results I did.

The URLs with edited partial screenshots you show do not have a
question mark at the end of the paragraph and I don't see an effect
similar to the one you're talking about.

`f' and `r' sometimes extend beyond their `character cell' in this
font which means that the inverse video of the highlighting sometimes
doesn't invert the whole width of the letter. This is inevitable in a
proportional font with properly-rendered ligatures.

I distrust your screenshots because you've obviously run them through
an image editor !

Ian.

[gniger (leeper)]

I never said anything about a question mark. It's the quotation mark at the end that gets mutilated. If you don't trust me, you should go to slashdot yourself and select some text at the beginning of a line with a quotation mark at the end. Hopefully you'll be able to see what I'm talking about.

-- Gary

[Ian Jackson (ijackson)]

gniger writes ("[Bug 30908] some weird font garbling when selecting text in firefox"):
> I never said anything about a question mark. It's the quotation mark at
> the end that gets mutilated. If you don't trust me, you should go to
> slashdot yourself and select some text at the beginning of a line with a
> quotation mark at the end. Hopefully you'll be able to see what I'm
> talking about.

Sorry, I must have misread you about the question mark. But yes, I've
tried exactly what you suggest and it looks just fine to me.

Ian.

[gniger (leeper)]

OK, to make sure this wasn't specific to my desktop computer I tested firefox on my laptop and the bug was still there. I made a video in xvidcap to demonstrate what exactly happens. In the video I repeatedly select the beginning of two lines of text, the first with a 't' and the second with a double quotation mark. Notice how part of the right edges of the t and the quotation mark disappear when I select text in front of them.

http://www.bayou.com/~woodland/lol.mpg

[Alexandre Otto Strube (surak)]

Did you checked in your debian and ubuntu if you have the same fonts? Did you checked with mozilla.com's firefox version?

[gniger (leeper)]

Well, the problem has disappeared after the latest update. If nobody else is still experiencing this then I think it's safe to close.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

According to comments, this is no longer reproducible by anyone. Closing.