Poor default fonts in Firefox
Ken Moffat
zarniwhoop at ntlworld.com
Sun Jan 7 21:10:02 UTC 2018
I thought this was a private mail, but Christian's other replies
copied the list, and I don't think there is anything private in his
part, so I'm now forwarding my reply to the list.
----- Forwarded message from Ken Moffat <zarniwhoop at ntlworld.com> -----
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2018 19:54:51 +0000
From: Ken Moffat <zarniwhoop at ntlworld.com>
To: Christian Weisgerber <naddy at mips.inka.de>
Subject: Re: Poor default fonts in Firefox
User-Agent: Mutt/1.9.2 (2017-12-15)
On Sun, Jan 07, 2018 at 05:30:06PM +0100, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> Ken Moffat:
>
> > > http://shell.uugrn.org/~naddy/bbcnews.xwd.xz
> >
> > If you download the current page you will see that it includes
> > https://nav.files.bbci.co.uk/orbit/1.0.0-571.15b54a4/css/orb-ltr.min.css
> > which uses some BBCReith fonts (Sans and Serif) and these are woff2
> > fonts, so for everything using those fonts you will get the official
> > fonts if you allow the page to use them (ISTR somebody mentioned
> > overriding that).
> >
> > If you don't let firefox use them, then I assume you will get whatever
> > you have set as the fonts in firefox's preferences. If those are
> > merely Sans and Serif then fc-match will tell you what it is using.
>
> FWIW, Firefox happily tells you what font it uses: select a piece
> of text, right-click, select "Inspect Element", in the bottom right
> select "Fonts".
>
Thanks, I didn't know that.
> For the BBC web site headlines and article text that comes out as
>
> Helvetica system
> Used as: "Helvetica"
>
> here. (The Firefox font configuration is the Firefox default.)
>
Yes, the woff information in the stylesheet turned out to be a red
herring for the BBC.
On my current machine I prefer TexGyreHeros and clicking on some text
at the BBC News page showed it was using the Bold variant (it isn't,
the link/headline above that was in bold, and even selecting only the
article text I had had an option to open in a new tab!).
Going to a different BBC news article and again selecting only some
text from the middle of the article, that is apparently in GEL Icons
Full Regular - labelled as remote with a link and (woff) after it.
Clearly that applies to something else on the page, perhaps the
*book and tw?tter icons.
Looking at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chrony which I
happened to have open, the example output in the blue or grey boxes
is clearly monospace, but the normal text on a white background is
clearly variable width. But when I select some of that normal text
it tells me it is I get various reports of Liberation Sans, ...
bold, ... mono depending on which short piece of text I inspect.
Certainly it is Liberation Sans, because that is how I set my
preferences on this machine.
This is in ff58.0beta14, and I would be inclined to treat what the
inspector tells me with the proverbial grain of salt.
ĸen
--
Truth, in front of her huge walk-in wardrobe, selected black leather
boots with stiletto heels for such a barefaced truth.
- Unseen Academicals
----- End forwarded message -----
--
Truth, in front of her huge walk-in wardrobe, selected black leather
boots with stiletto heels for such a barefaced truth.
- Unseen Academicals
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