New fontconfig update degrades appearance of fonts

[Scott Garman]

Within the past couple of days, the dapper update fontconfig-2.3.2-1.1ubuntu8 has caused a noticable degredation in the appearance of default fonts used in Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird. Some discussion on the Ubuntu Forums suggests that this could be a problem with the autohinter. I will post before/after screenshots below to demonstrate how things changed.

[Scott Garman (sgarman)]

A screenshot of Firefox using fontconfig-2.3.2-1.1ubuntu6, when the fonts looked good.

[Scott Garman (sgarman)]

A screenshot of Firefox using fontconfig-2.3.2-1.1ubuntu8, the latest update, where the fonts have become degraded.

[Matthew East (mdke)]

Yes, I can confirm that there has now been a bit readability regression in default fonts for browsers (epiphany and firefox). Posting another screenshot which shows it clearly with the browser homepage.

Matt

[Matthew East (mdke)]

screenshot, as above

[Marco Paulo Martins Sousa (marcomsousa)]

maxpt badfonts

[catinsnow (catinsnow)]

the changlog has commentated the reason:

Changes:
 fontconfig (2.3.2-1.1ubuntu7) dapper; urgency=low
 .
  * Revert the 2.3.2-1ubuntu2 change, readd the aliases for the
    Helvetica, Times and Courier families to point to the URW Nimbus
    fonts.
 .
    Rationale:
    - Without these aliases, existing documents (i.e. PDF and Postscript)
      using these font families cannot be correctly viewed. fontconfig would
      find the metric incompatible DejaVu font as a replacement.
    - Firefox can be configured not to use the fonts defined by the webpage.

[David Schroeder (medgno)]

In addition, this seems to prevent the "minimum font size" option from working, which is a real drag for those of us who need or want larger fonts.

[David Schroeder (medgno)]

Wow, I'm really sorry. Restarting firefox fixed all my problems, such as minimum font size, and the fonts now look just like they did before.

[Ilmari Vacklin (wolverian)]

I can confirm that the fonts look horrible. Seems to be that it's the FreeSans/Serif fonts that are now aliased as the common sans/serif fonts. Unfortunately they look horrible. They're good fallback fonts, as they have a _lot_ of characters, but at least their latin part is ugly.

[Ilmari Vacklin (wolverian)]

Ah, sorry for the spam, but I see now that it's the URW family, not freefonts, that are used. Sorry again, I'll read the whole bugreport the next time.

In any case, the bug is still valid.

[Matthew East (mdke)]

On Fri, 2006-04-14 at 07:49 +0000, Ilmari Vacklin wrote:
> In any case, the bug is still valid.

Indeed, it's a sad day when installing msttcorefonts makes the Ubuntu
homepage and website look better.

M
--
<email address hidden>
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF

[Marco Paulo Martins Sousa (marcomsousa)]

>Indeed, it's a sad day when installing msttcorefonts makes the Ubuntu
>homepage and website look better.

But this font are very diferent that other OS, use..
And the font in one website are to be the same in all OS.

If some wesite look better, so this website need to change the old font, to this, and not the OS to change the default font..

My website are lot's diferent, iIcan read better but with this new fonts, my website have bad design.

[Ilmari Vacklin (wolverian)]

Should this be assigned to the GNOME desktop team?

[Pavel Mihaylov (bin)]

It is a Mozilla (i.e. Gecko) problem, not a GNOME one. If you type about:config in a browser and filter on 'font.name.sans-serif' you'll see the fonts (for different scripts/encodings) Gecko uses when 'sans-serif' is asked for by an HTML page. The problem is it has Helvetica for some of them there when it should have sans-serif. Putting sans-serif in all of these solves the problem. You may wish to fix 'font.name.serif' and 'font.name.monospace' too (replacing Times and Courier with serif and monospace). All that looks like a remnant from Netscape's days.

PS Another bug: when you change an entry from Helvetica to sans-serif it may not change on the screen (i.e. you still see Helvetica), refresh the page to make sure it really changed.

[Ilmari Vacklin (wolverian)]

Changing Helvetica to sans-serif has not fixed this bug completely for me. At least a site with the CSS font description of "font-family: 'Corbel', 'Cambria', 'trebuchet ms', helvetica, arial, sans-serif;" still looks ugly. Is there a way to see which font Firefox/Epiphany actually uses for rendering, besides just matching visually?

[Pavel Mihaylov (bin)]

Yeah, it won't fix sites which explicitly ask for Helvetica (like the one you mentioned). The only solution in such a case would be disabling the URW/Helvetica aliasing in /etc/fonts/font.config or using custom fonts in the browser.

[Ilmari Vacklin (wolverian)]

Pavel: Or removing the alias from the package.

[Scott Garman (sgarman)]

Thank you, the new fontconfig ubuntu9 packages have resolved the problem with Firefox and Thunderbird, even if they are temporary fixes.

[rubinstein (rubinstein)]

I installed the new dapper beta and upgraded to fontconfig ubuntu10 package, and my fonts look bad, like the screenshot in the second comment (by ScottGarman at 2006-04-13 15:22:27), so the problem persists...

[Ilmari Vacklin (wolverian)]

With the latest fontconfig, I still see bad serif fonts (looks URW) on some sites, and the "ö" character (o with two dots above it) is missing its right dot in 10pt.

[Ilmari Vacklin (wolverian)]

Sorry, the ö bug happens only in sans fonts, which seem to be DejaVu.

[João Pinto (joaopinto)]

The problem was fixed for me with the first fontconfig update after the bug report, with the latest fontconfig update the browser fonts are UGLY again.

[Ilmari Vacklin (wolverian)]

2.3.2-1.1ubuntu10 has not fixed the ö problem for me. Maybe I should submit a separate bug?

[Scott Garman (sgarman)]

Yes, I was disappointed to find out that the new ubuntu10 update for fontconfig has reverted back to the ugly fonts for Firefox and Thunderbird. I hope someone at Canonical steps in to help sort this out; either evince or Firefox & Thunderbird need to be patched so that they know which fonts to use. Each update to fontconfig seems to negatively impact one of these two sets of apps.

[Bruce Cowan (bruce89-deactivatedaccount)]

Actually, ubuntu10 fixes the issue for me.

[Andrew Somerville (andy-somerville)]

There is a separate bug for 2.3.2-1.1ubuntu10, 40698, open at: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/fontconfig/+bug/40698/+index

[Bruce Cowan (bruce89-deactivatedaccount)]

Actually, it's a dupe.

[Adolfo González Blázquez (infinito)]

Could this bug have anything in common with this?
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/vte/+bug/40944

[Lucas Arruda (lucasarruda)]

I also had this problem and reported here. There are also screens.

https://launchpad.net/bugs/40080

[Ilmari Vacklin (wolverian)]

This screenshot shows the problem with the "ö" (o-umlaut) character. Is this a separate bug?

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

is this still an issue in intrepid/jaunty?

[Ilmari Vacklin (wolverian)]

2009/3/16 Alexander Sack <email address hidden>:
> is this still an issue in intrepid/jaunty?

I'm not sure what the exact problem in this bug report is. In any
case, I don't see the extremely weird looking umlaut characters
anymore.

I also just disable hinting altogether nowadays.

[Bazon (bazonbloch)]

No issue anymore IMO.