Poor default fonts in Firefox
Polytropon
freebsd at edvax.de
Sun Jan 7 17:40:43 UTC 2018
On Sun, 7 Jan 2018 16:58:32 +0100, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> Polytropon:
>
> > > You install a new FreeBSD machine with a graphics display, install
> > > the xorg and firefox ports on it, all default options, start browsing
> > > the web... and you see that some sites (e.g. http://www.bbc.com/news)
> > > are presented with pixelated fonts like something out of the 1990s.
> > >
> > > What do you do?
> >
> > You install the recommended font packages. :-)
>
> Well, there is no such recommendation.
It is an "implicit recommendation" which is used so frequently
that nobody mentions itanymore . "If you want usable fonts,
then go ahead and install them!" ;-)
> > > My personal solution for the last few years has been to pinch
> > > OpenBSD's etc/fonts/conf.avail/31-nonmst.conf file...
> >
> > This isn't needed as soon as the webfonts package has
> > been installed. And even the DejaVu fonts need to be
> > installed manually, if I remember correctly.
>
> No, Deja Vu is a standard dependency:
> x11/xorg
> -> x11-fonts/xorg-fonts
> -> x11-fonts/x11-fonts/xorg-fonts-truetype
> -> x11-fonts/dejavu
Good to know. I don't know the exact dependency trees for
the different fonts and how they might have changed over
time, so maybe my assumption is no longer true.
> Installing webfonts does NOT fix the problem. fc-match shows that
> popular font names like "Helvetica" and "Times" are still mapped
> to the same bitmap fonts as before and that's what you still get
> in Firefox.
Maybe there is a different problem: Maybe the page in question
supplies its own font, and this font just gets rendered in a
really terrible manner by the browser's font rendering engine?
There could also be a setting within the browser that handles
fonts (and prevents the correct usage of a font that is already
present on the system).
I don't have much experience in "pixel-perfect web publishing
as if it was a printed material", because I usually work with
printed material.
--
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
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