small fonts in epiphany

[Rolf Leggewie]

Binary package hint: epiphany-browser

some pages that used to display fine with epiphany in the gutsy version are now being shown in a hard-to-read smallish font size (see screen shot)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for your bug report, do you have the same issue using firefox? don't specify the ubuntu version in the title that quickly outdated and create confusion and extra work

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

I used to have similar trouble yesterday with FF2. Have since fully embraced FF3 and don't remember seeing it there.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

unconfirming, I've no such issue in hardy

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue that you reported is one that should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release - Intrepid Ibex. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. You can find out more about the development release at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ . Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to New. Thanks again!.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

My computer does not have a CD ROM drive, it is a Thinkpad X24. I will report about this problem once I find the time to do so.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

still happening after the latest FF updates in hardy. I attach a screenshot to compare side-by-side FF3 with a comfortable, readable size at 100% and epiphany which is difficult to read at 100%.

[Avaddon (avaddon-kazancity)]

Just adjust minimal font size in settings.

[Matijs van Zuijlen (matijs)]

Adjusting the minimal font size does help in making text readable, but the result is that, e.g., headings that would have a smaller size than the minimal font size will have the same size as the text. That's not what I want in a graphical browser.

[Guilherme Gondim (semente) (semente)]

This bug affect me in Karmic.

[Guilherme Gondim (semente) (semente)]

Attaching a Firefox and Epiphany comparison in the *same machine*. I think that is a epiphany problem with DPI, once it doesn't show the DPI information.

[Veli-Jussi Raitila (vjraitila)]

Browsing through the Epiphany source, I would say that it is not a DPI issue as such. They've switched from Gecko to Webkit rendering engine in the latest version and changed the way fonts are handled in the process. They use Gnome desktop settings in the browser to render the default variable-width and monospace fonts.

I'm not an expert, but could not see a way to bypass this behavior except by patching the code.

[Guilherme Gondim (semente) (semente)]

Hi Veli, in some previous Epiphany versions (with Gecko) I had the same problem. I tried change the desktop font settings too, but the fonts size in Epiphany don't change.

[Guilherme Gondim (semente) (semente)]

Discussion in Epiphany list for reference: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/epiphany-list/2009-October/msg00041.html

Attached another screenshot for comparison (Felix made changes in http://fm.no-ip.com/auth/Font/fonts-ptdemo.html). The DPI info showed now.

[Felix Miata (mrmazda)]

I installed Epiphany under Karmic Kubuntu. I see no way evident to directly influence the size of Epiphany web page fonts other than via its minimum size setting or use of zoom. Epiphany does not respond to changes in KDE font settings in any way that I can tell. http://fm.no-ip.com/auth/dpi-screen-window.html and http://fm.no-ip.com/auth/Font/fonts-ptdemo.html are my web pages used in Guilherme's screenshots.

[Veli-Jussi Raitila (vjraitila)]

Changing the Application and Fixed width font settings in the Gnome preferences does affect the ones used in Epiphany for me. You just have to restart the browser.

There is something fishy about it, though. Epiphany behaves differently when using generic font families (namely serif and sans-serif). Since there is no way to specify a "sans-serif" in Gnome, it obviously does not work. The font scaling is way off as well except for monospace. The styles exhibiting the generic families problem is highlighted in my screenshot.

For this test I have set the Application font as "Times New Roman 12pt" and the Fixed width font for "Courier New 10pt" in Gnome. Firefox has the same fonts set, but using pixel sizes (16px and 13px, respectively). There is nothing wrong with DPI as far as I can tell.

[Veli-Jussi Raitila (vjraitila)]

The quick-and-dirty test file I used is this one

[Veli-Jussi Raitila (vjraitila)]

@Guilherme
In your first screenshot the two browsers are clearly using different fonts. Examine the top of the lower case "t", for example. So I think the problem is with font families.

@Felix
Like I said, I'm no expert. But it would seem that Epiphany uses a GConf-backend to retrieve the font settings in Gnome. I would not be surprised if it does not work in KDE.

[Veli-Jussi Raitila (vjraitila)]

I did some more research and found out that Epiphany apparently uses a combination of Gnome settings and fontconfig to select the appropriate font and its size for generic font families. The reason why the "serif" family looks weird in my screenshot, is because fontconfig suggests "DejaVu Serif" for it on my setup. If I create a .fonts.conf file that overrides that with "Times New Roman", it works as expected.

I could not still find a way to choose the font family used for "sans-serif" though. Anyway, this seems to be an upstream issue and a proper way to fix it IMHO, would be allow the user to override the system-wide font settings. That would be consistent with gedit, gnome-terminal and gnome help browser etc.

[Guilherme Gondim (semente) (semente)]

Hi Veli-Jussi!

Really, restarting Epiphany the fonts are changed.

Epiphany uses GNOME font settings to determine default font size and type. Is not good, because if I change the application font to 12pt, my whole desktop will had big fonts.

Epiphany needs your own font settings configured for a serif font size 12 (like all other web browsers).

[Jeremy Nickurak (nickurak)]

Oddly enough, my font sizing issues dissapered as soon as I removed the ttf-mscorefonts-installer under Ubuntu. My guess is there's actually a problem with the sizing information for a font in there.

If someone can confirm this issue still occuring without that package installed, maybe we should reopen it. Until then, I'm marking this incomplete.

[Matijs van Zuijlen (matijs)]

I'm still seeing this problem in Epiphany 2.30.6 on Debian. No mscorefont in sight.

My Ubuntu system has a sufficiently low DPI to make the fonts readable, but they're much smaller than in Firefox there as well. No mscorefont there either.

Perhaps there is a more generic font problem that is triggered by the mscorefonts installer and also some other fonts?

[Jeremy Nickurak (nickurak)]

Darn, thought I had that one. Reversed.

[Jeremy Nickurak (nickurak)]

Indeed, I'm hitting this without ttf-mscorefonts-installer now too. :(

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

fixed upstream and in Debian experimental. Let's wait for natty+1

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

Upstream bug closed "RESOLVED FIXED" on 2011-03-11
Further to comment #27, closing as fixed