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Firefox 3.x Font Issue?

Started by RobertM, 2008.08.13, 02:50:27

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RobertM

Hey everyone,

So... I "upgraded" to Firefox 3.0 and then Firefox 3.0.1 (upgraded is in quotes because I actually still have and use Firefox 2.0.0.15).

I am running into two weird issues with both FF3 builds that did not happen in FF2.


  • FF3 will only render Arial and Arial Black (displays Arial Bold, Arial Bold Italic and Arial Italic as Times New Roman - see attached screenshot... the code I used to test this after seeing this happen on other sites is pretty much just this:

<P><font face="Arial Bold Italic">Arial Bold Italic</font>


    Which works for Arial Black and Arial


    • The second issue is really weird, and I cannot get FF3 on Windows to replicate it on the same pages... but when I go to certain pages, FF3 seems to resize the entire document to something roughly 85% smaller (images and text). I have no idea why. I had the GBM plugin installed, and removed it - still same results. FF2 also did not do this. This is even more weird since the Windows XP machine with the same build of FF3 doesnt do it.

    For the first issue, I have uninstalled the fonts, tried the ATM versions I have, same results. Uninstalled the fonts again, tried the MS Web Font Pack from Hobbes, same results. (rebooted between font changes).

    Also, FF3 was running with the default theme, and virtually every add-on disabled.

    Anyone have any ideas, I'd greatly appreciate it.

    Rob


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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RobertM

Here are screenshots from both browsers... both browsers open to the same size, load the same pages, etc...

I used PMView to cut the image from the FF2 screenshot and overlay it on the FF3 screenshot. The image size difference is roughly 91% - dunno why.

The images attached are:
- BOTH (overlaid as described above)
- FF3 (wrong size... if you d/l the screenshot and use PMView to determine the size, you should get 893px)

-FF2 (right size... if you d/l the screenshot and use PMView to determine the size, you should get 980px).

The HTML has all the correct sizes in it...

Thanks gang,
Robert


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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warpcafe

Hi Robert,

did you check readmes or other FAQ/known-bugs infos? And - as the FF ports are maintained by Peter Weilbacher - perhaps you can check with him? Now for my assumptions:
What comes to mind in that regard almost immediately is the Innotek FontEngine. Perhaps "they" (FFx team/porter) did change something to the way the IFE settings are stored in the registry?
FWIW, I remember that sometime back, they changed the registry branch used from HKCU (user-part, was used until 2.40 version) to HKLM (machine-part) which I found to be "wrong", well, but... anyway. Perhaps the readmes or other docs contain a note regarding the OS/2 ports font stuff?

Cheers, HTH,
Thomas
"It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority.
By definition, there are already enough people to do that"
- G.H. Hardy

jep

Hello,

I've also experienced similar problems, could e.g. see how the browser recalculated the page size and scaled it down after load was complete. (Very obvious on a slow computer)

If i remember correctly, aren't they moving away from font rendering engine within FireFox for OS/2-eCS?

I've since switched to Firefox 3.1, though it is "pre alpha" and it is much better than 3.0.x, I can't say if it release the memory back to the OS better, but so far, a bit further in the right direction. I haven't experienced more problems in it than in FF2 or FF3.0 at least, printing untested though.

//Jan-Erik

herwigb

Just for the records: Firefox 3.x DOES NOT USE the Innotek Fontengine for font rendering.

Kind regards,
Herwig
Kind regards,
HerwigB.

Saijin_Naib

Yeah, it says so on the Warpzilla page. The Font rendering in FFX is done with the Cairo libraries, so remove all references to Firefox from the IFE keys.

warpcafe

Hi,

Quote from: herwigb on 2008.08.13, 11:26:30
Just for the records: Firefox 3.x DOES NOT USE the Innotek Fontengine for font rendering.

Kind regards,
Herwig

That might explain. ;) At least my assumption was correct that FFx3 handles something different in regards to the IFE. :) And now that you told it... I seem to remember it was mentioned in either the release notes or the announcement.

Regards,
Thomas
"It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority.
By definition, there are already enough people to do that"
- G.H. Hardy

RobertM

#7
Quote from: warpcafe on 2008.08.13, 10:34:17
Hi Robert,

did you check readmes or other FAQ/known-bugs infos? And - as the FF ports are maintained by Peter Weilbacher - perhaps you can check with him?

I was going to... but first I wanted to see if it was specific to my machine, or if it was some idiotic setting someplace that I missed before I bugged him. Saw nothing in the readme about this issue (or in the bugs on bugzilla - those all seemed to be related to showing the correct fonts, but too thick, too blurry or too something - but correct font used nonetheless).


Here's the weird thing. I did some more tests...

http://www.aibuiltpc.com/FFFontTest2.html

If I use style sheets and set font-family to Arial, and font-style to italic, it works if I set font-weight to bold, that works (or any combination thereof for Arial or Arial Black).

If I use "regular" HTML (and select the working font) such as:
<font name="Arial"><b>Bolded Arial</b></font>

Then that works as well.

If you go to the test page, the first section marks which ones display correctly, and which ones do not (uses default browser serif font - in my case Times New Roman)... the second and third sections using different methods work - but I think that is because they are using the working font (Arial, Arial Black) and the browser is bolding or italicizing them (instead of grabbing the bold or italic version).

[/quote]
Quote from: herwigb on 2008.08.13, 11:26:30
Just for the records: Firefox 3.x DOES NOT USE the Innotek Fontengine for font rendering.

Kind regards,
Herwig

HRMPH! Well, I thought I was on to something (I am stuck with IFE2.40 on this machine... and neither I nor anyone here could figure out why, short of a big INI problem - which I am too lazy to resolve).

Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2008.08.13, 18:53:25
Yeah, it says so on the Warpzilla page. The Font rendering in FFX is done with the Cairo libraries, so remove all references to Firefox from the IFE keys.

Cant, I still use FF2 (I must use it till the resize issue at the least is resolved - that and FireFTP doesnt run on FF2 anymore (gotta find the older version that does).

But that brings up questions... what version of Cairo should be installed on the system? Or is the required code built into the browser?

Thomas, herwigb, saijin... Thanks to all of you for your help! Now, hopefully someone can figure out the scaling issue. I will send Peter an email and see what he says...

Rob



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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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Saijin_Naib

Well, I noticed that if you turn off the IFE for firefox, it seems to render much quicker. I posted a while back that FF3 was disappointingly slow, and now I guess we know why. Granted, its still slower to render than FF3 on Windows or Linux or OSX, but its improved.

I don't think the Cairo runtime need be installed Robert, but for good practice I always make sure I have the most recent versions of that and SDL installed.

Currently writing from gOS, I was silently going to defect from the eCS camp because I was getting pissed at a few things, but I'm realizing that besides having a larger program library, Linux is pretty much epic fail next to eCS. That's kinda sad :\ Now to go put eCS back on and get this GNU crap the hell off my computer.

jep

Hello Saijin_Naib,

Quote
Currently writing from gOS, I was silently going to defect from the eCS camp because I was getting pissed at a few things, but I'm realizing that besides having a larger program library, Linux is pretty much epic fail next to eCS. That's kinda sad :\ Now to go put eCS back on and get this GNU crap the hell off my computer.

Sum it up quite well I think.

btw Welcome "back" Saijin_Naib ;D

warpcafe

Hi all,

the basic problem is that the IFE "handles" the active/inactive state on a per-executable basis, meaning: The exe name. Thus, if both FFx2 and FFx3 have a "firefox.exe", it will be impossible to have FFx2 USE the IFE and FFx3 NOT USE the IFE.
A workaround would be to rename the executables... perhaps. I'm not aware of any possible implications - if that works, so to say.

Now for the topic ob "being stuck with 2.40" version of the IFE... what is that about? Perhaps we can sort this out somehow. Note that 2.40 uses the HKEY_CURRENT_USER path for stroing the keys, while the later one (is that 2.60?) uses the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE "tree"... Robert, feel free to open a new thread for that "big INI problem", and I'll try to investigate on it.

Cheers,
Thomas
"It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority.
By definition, there are already enough people to do that"
- G.H. Hardy

Doodle

Quote from: RobertM on 2008.08.13, 21:23:35

But that brings up questions... what version of Cairo should be installed on the system? Or is the required code built into the browser?


Firefox has its own Cairo library compiled into the Firefox executable.
So, it doesn't matter which Cairo runtime DLLs you have installed (it doesn't matter if you have the Cairo runtime DLLs installed at all), Firefox uses its own.

The Cairo runtime DLLs are (currently) only used by some DSSaver modules and WPSWizard.

Doodle

Saijin_Naib

#12
I don't know if anyone else has done this, but I've updated and installed the most recent FreeType/2 engine to OS/2 and used the FT2GUI application to set my font engine to FreeType/2 instead of the IBM TrueType engine. This seems to have improved font handing/rendering everywhere, including the WPS and has lead to Firefox rendering fonts a little more sensibly. That and I replaced all the OS/2 TTF fonts with Windows TTF fonts (imported my whole windows Fonts directory). All seems well so far.

Sorry you are stuck with 2.40 Robert! That version always caused my internet sessions to be very short lived. I'm glad I have it off now and FFX3 seems to be stable, well, until I try and watch flash videos atleast.

RobertM

Quote from: warpcafe on 2008.08.14, 10:29:55
Hi all,

the basic problem is that the IFE "handles" the active/inactive state on a per-executable basis, meaning: The exe name. Thus, if both FFx2 and FFx3 have a "firefox.exe", it will be impossible to have FFx2 USE the IFE and FFx3 NOT USE the IFE.
A workaround would be to rename the executables... perhaps. I'm not aware of any possible implications - if that works, so to say.

Hi Thomas,

I am guessing that if no one else is experiencing font issues, then it may be something weird like that... I will try disabling IFE for FF or renaming FF3 and see what happens...

Has anyone else who is running FF3 tried the page on my site?

http://www.aibuiltpc.com/FFFontTest2.html

The first section should have two displayed correctly (Arial, and Arial Black), with the rest being displayed in the same font (whatever you have the default set to in FF3). All text in the second and third section should display correctly.

Quote from: warpcafe on 2008.08.14, 10:29:55
Now for the topic ob "being stuck with 2.40" version of the IFE... what is that about? Perhaps we can sort this out somehow. Note that 2.40 uses the HKEY_CURRENT_USER path for stroing the keys, while the later one (is that 2.60?) uses the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE "tree"... Robert, feel free to open a new thread for that "big INI problem", and I'll try to investigate on it.

Thanks Thomas... will start another thread... I am running into all sorts of issues when it comes to (upgrading) IFE, or opening folders with certain images or PDFs in them (WPS crashes, restarts without WPSWizard support).

And Doodle, Thomas, Saijin_Naib, everyone, thanks for your help,
Robert


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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warpcafe

Hi Robert,

Quote from: RobertM on 2008.08.14, 16:45:53
Has anyone else who is running FF3 tried the page on my site?

not until 1 minute ago ;)
I must admit that it's FF3 on Windows (~XP SP2) - more precisely:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1

However... yes, it displays just like what the text behind the font samples says ("...shows up as times new roman"). Does that help?

BTW - looking at your html source code... perhaps instead of doing something wrong, FFx3 rather does something "more precisely" than its ancestors? Who knows what Cairo is able to do? Scan the real font family from the TTF header and make it load the non-bold, non-italic "parent" font instead undless there are markups that tell it to bolden and/or italicize it?
Hmmm... just guessing here.

Regards,
Thomas
"It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority.
By definition, there are already enough people to do that"
- G.H. Hardy