[snap] New Ubuntu font with normal weight displayed as bold in Google Docs in Chromium after upgrading to Lunar

[Andrea Ieri]

I am experiencing a rendering regression after upgrading from Kinetic to Lunar.
Google Docs using the Ubuntu font family are displayed incorrectly in Chromium: the normal weight font is rendered identically to the bold weight one, instead of being thicker than light and thinner than medium.

Printing is also affected, unless I use Google Docs' download to PDF function, although that probably triggers a server-side rendering.

This issue does not occur in Firefox or Google Chrome.

One thing that may be relevant: if I force-refresh my test Google Doc I see all four Ubuntu font lines initially being rendered as bold. The light and medium lines are then re-rendered with the correct weight. It's as if bold was the default weight and the normal variant disappeared.

As far as I can tell I was already running Chromium 112.0.5615.49 in Kinetic, and with Chromium being a snap I don't quite understand why the Ubuntu series would matter.

I have also tried version 114.0.5735.16 (in latest/beta at the moment); the symptoms are identical.

The attachments show the rendering error.

[Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)]

I can confirm this with the new font 0.863-0ubuntu3, though not with the 0.83-6ubuntu1.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)]

> One thing that may be relevant: if I force-refresh my test Google Doc I see all four Ubuntu font lines initially being rendered as bold. The light and medium lines are then re-rendered with the correct weight. It's as if bold was the default weight and the normal variant disappeared.

Interesting observation, I can reproduce that.

> As far as I can tell I was already running Chromium 112.0.5615.49 in Kinetic, and with Chromium being a snap I don't quite understand why the Ubuntu series would matter.

Because Ubuntu Lunar uses the 0.83-6ubuntu1 while older releases are currently on the older 0.863-0ubuntu3.

[Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)]

Andreas noticed in the duplicate report that

> The chromium console log also shows a lot of these 404 errors for *.woff2 fonts:
>
> GET filesystem:https://docs.google.com/persistent/docs/fonts/KFO8CneDtsqEr0keqCMhbCc_Mn33tY0.woff2 net::ERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND

[Andrea Ieri (aieri)]

I can confirm this is still happening in mantic, using the following versions:

chromium 118.0.5993.88
fonts-ubuntu 0.869-0ubuntu1

[Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)]

Workaround:

  apt install fonts-ubuntu- fonts-ubuntu-classic

[Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)]

The new font relies on some different mechanism to determine the style of a given typeface, as each different style points to a same file. The old font doesn't do that. Maybe that could be tripping the resolution.

--->
# ubuntu-fonts
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 jun 21 10:35 UbuntuMono-B.ttf -> 'UbuntuMono[wght].ttf'
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 jun 21 10:35 UbuntuMono-BI.ttf -> 'UbuntuMono-Italic[wght].ttf'
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 169K mar 24 2023 'UbuntuMono-Italic[wght].ttf'
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 jun 21 10:35 UbuntuMono-R.ttf -> 'UbuntuMono[wght].ttf'
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 jun 21 10:35 UbuntuMono-RI.ttf -> 'UbuntuMono-Italic[wght].ttf'
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 169K mar 24 2023 'UbuntuMono[wght].ttf'
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 jun 21 10:35 Ubuntu-B.ttf -> 'Ubuntu[wdth,wght].ttf'
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 28 jun 21 10:35 Ubuntu-BI.ttf -> 'Ubuntu-Italic[wdth,wght].ttf'
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 jun 21 10:35 Ubuntu-C.ttf -> 'Ubuntu[wdth,wght].ttf'
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 664K jun 21 10:34 'Ubuntu-Italic[wdth,wght].ttf'
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 jun 21 10:35 Ubuntu-L.ttf -> 'Ubuntu[wdth,wght].ttf'
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 28 jun 21 10:35 Ubuntu-LI.ttf -> 'Ubuntu-Italic[wdth,wght].ttf'
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 jun 21 10:35 Ubuntu-M.ttf -> 'Ubuntu[wdth,wght].ttf'
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 28 jun 21 10:35 Ubuntu-MI.ttf -> 'Ubuntu-Italic[wdth,wght].ttf'
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 jun 21 10:35 Ubuntu-R.ttf -> 'Ubuntu[wdth,wght].ttf'
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 28 jun 21 10:35 Ubuntu-RI.ttf -> 'Ubuntu-Italic[wdth,wght].ttf'
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 jun 21 10:35 Ubuntu-Th.ttf -> 'Ubuntu[wdth,wght].ttf'
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1,1M jun 21 10:34 'Ubuntu[wdth,wght].ttf'

# ubuntu-fonts-classic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 187K set 26 2011 UbuntuMono-B.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 212K set 26 2011 UbuntuMono-BI.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 201K set 26 2011 UbuntuMono-R.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 206K set 26 2011 UbuntuMono-RI.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 326K jul 10 2015 Ubuntu-B.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 349K jul 10 2015 Ubuntu-BI.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 343K jul 10 2015 Ubuntu-C.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 406K jul 10 2015 Ubuntu-L.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 401K jul 10 2015 Ubuntu-LI.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 334K jul 10 2015 Ubuntu-M.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 359K jul 10 2015 Ubuntu-MI.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 346K jul 10 2015 Ubuntu-R.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 378K jul 10 2015 Ubuntu-RI.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 235K fev 18 2022 Ubuntu-Th.ttf
<---

Edit: The symlinks can be deleted, they are meant just for a smooth upgrade mechanism, and have no effect in the problem here described.

[Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)]

Bold renders fine given simple CSS:

<html>
  <p style="font-family:ubuntu">Ubuntu.</p>
  <p style="font-family:ubuntu"><b>Ubuntu bold.</b></p>
</html>

This looks specific to Google Docs.

[Andreas Hasenack (ahasenack)]

I installed ubuntu-fonts-classic from mantic on my lunar desktop (it's not available for lunar). It removed ubuntu-fonts, but the fonts look ok now in google docs. Got some differences in my desktop too, but still looks ok.

[Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)]

More information dump:

* It's easier to see the error Andreas mentioned with --enable-logging=stderr:

--->
[246126:246235:1023/123348.818876:WARNING:obfuscated_file_util.cc(1323)] Failed to get origin+type directory: { uri: filesystem:https://docs.google.com/persistent/docs/fonts/4iCv6KVjbNBYlgoCxCvTsg.woff2, storage key: { origin: https://docs.google.com, top-level site: https://google.com, nonce: <null>, ancestor chain bit: Same-Site } } error:-4
[246126:246235:1023/123348.818941:WARNING:obfuscated_file_util.cc(1323)] Failed to get origin+type directory: { uri: filesystem:https://docs.google.com/persistent/docs/fonts/4iCp6KVjbNBYlgoKejZPsmyN.woff2, storage key: { origin: https://docs.google.com, top-level site: https://google.com, nonce: <null>, ancestor chain bit: Same-Site } } error:-4
<---

I don't quite understand the process there, an uneducated guess: It is trying to fetch a font and then storing it using the filesystem API — which would save it in snap/chromium/common/chromium/Default/File\ Systems but that directory doesn't even exist. Maybe Firefox's implementation differs from Chromium's critically enough to hit this bug. Disabling that with --disable-file-system has no effect.

* Docs uses a remote font instead of a system font because --disable-remote-fonts prevents the Ubuntu font from loading despite it still being listed (the 't' character is a giveaway). This is in line with the error message.

* Since we don't get the problem in Firefox, I tried switching the user agent to Firefox just to see if behavior changed; it didn't.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

I doubt this is relevant — it was long ago and before any snap was used by default — but I recall that when we started to use Noto fonts for CJK languages in Xenial, there was initially an issue in Chrome/Chromium where it used the wrong weight if the font file included multiple weights (bug #1575555). The Debian/Ubuntu resolution to that issue was to switch to another font packaging model, where one font file per weight was used.

We also reported it as a font issue, but that didn't lead to anything:
https://github.com/notofonts/noto-cjk/issues/65

This Ubuntu font issue is also about Chromium and font files with multiple weights...

[Nathan Teodosio (nteodosio)]

Thanks for your input Gunnar, that might be really playing a role in the problem.

After all, it turns out the error Andreas reported is also present when the behavior is correct, i.e. with ubuntu-fonts-classic I get

--->
Failed to get origin+type directory: { uri: filesystem:https://docs.google.com/persistent/docs/fonts/4iCs6KVjbNBYlgo6fQ.woff2, storage key: { origin: https://docs.google.com, top-level site: https://google.com, nonce: <null>, ancestor chain bit: Same-Site } } error:-4
<---