X.org, firefox, and bitstream-vera

[Eric Anholt]

On Wed, 2004-08-18 at 13:22, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 18, 2004 at 12:53:29PM -0700, Eric Anholt wrote:
> > On Wed, 2004-08-18 at 02:59, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> > > Hi Eric,
> > > 
> > > Last Saturday, I've upgraded all of my ports on my 5.2-CURRENT
> > > notebook, including switching to X.org.  Everything went fine,
> > > except I now get insane large fonts when browsing www.FreeBSD.org,
> > > for example.  I tracked it down to the bitstream-vera port which
> > > is a runtime dependency of the x11-fonts/xorg-fonts-truetype.
> > > I was wondering, is there any real need for this dependency?
> > 
> > bitstream-vera has been part of the X distribution since XFree86 4.3.0. 
> > Instead of using the distribution-supplied bits (which should be exactly
> > the same), I used our existing port.  You're the second person to report
> > this issue with www.freebsd.org and bitstream-vera, but it's also what I
> > use and I don't see any problems.  Not sure what to say here.
> > 
> bitstream-vera is not installed with the XFree86 meta-port,
> the fact that it's installed with the xorg meta-port is the
> change in behavior.  My setup is very plain and standard.
> On a 4.x machine, I have XFree86-4.4.0,1 (no bitstream-vera).
> On a 5.x machine, I have xorg-6.7.0_1 (with bitstream-vera).
> I also have the following fonts installed, on both machines:

That's very odd.  They're integrated into imake, and they're built by
default in the monolithic X builds.  I'd blame our packaging.

> cyr-rfx-koi8-o-1.1
> mozilla-fonts-1.0_1
> webfonts-0.21_1
> 
> On 4.x, I get the English and Russian versions of the FreeBSD
> website displayed in a similarly sized font.  On 5.x with
> bitstream-vera, Russian version is still displayed with the
> same "normal" (in my definition of normal) sized font, while
> the English version is rendered by enlarged font from the
> bitstream-vera collection.  When I remove bitstream-vera,
> everything is back to normal.
> 
> Can you do this for me?  Please visit the www.FreeBSD.org's
> main page, visually remember the font size, then temporarily
> move /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/bitstream-vera to another
> directory so it's not found by fontconfig, restart X and
> browser (I'm using firefox) and visit the page again.  Can
> you see the difference in the size?

I went ahead and took screenshots.
http://people.freebsd.org/~anholt/vera.png
http://people.freebsd.org/~anholt/novera.png
http://people.freebsd.org/~anholt/none.png

The three in order are my normal desktop with bistream-vera, webfonts,
and the standard X set, mozilla with vera taken out, and mozilla with
the webfonts removed too.  There's definitely a size difference, but not
"insanely large," which made me think of a bug I've seen in the font
handling in mozilla, that I've never tracked down.  Of the three, I far
prefer FreeBSD.org's look when using vera.  But this is just personal
taste.  If you want to have programs prefer other fonts, you can edit
/usr/X11R6/etc/fonts/local.conf to prefer another font set.  See
fonts.conf for examples, but you're not supposed to modify that one.

-- 
Eric Anholt                                eta at lclark.edu          
http://people.freebsd.org/~anholt/         anholt at FreeBSD.org