MASTER - Font hinting does not honour gnome-settings in Firefox

I can confirm that. (v3.5pre https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-daily/+archive/ppa)
Here is a workaround: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7094387

no, that doesn't work i'm afraid.

2009/6/21 tankdriver <email address hidden>

> I can confirm that. (v3.5pre
> https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-daily/+archive/ppa<https://launchpad.net/%7Eubuntu-mozilla-daily/+archive/ppa>
> )
> Here is a workaround: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7094387
>
> --
> FF 3.5 font hinting
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/379761
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>
> Status in “firefox-3.5” source package in Ubuntu: New
>
> Bug description:
> Binary package hint: firefox-3.5
>
> asac, ask that I create a new account and observe if the FF 3.5 uses the
> gnome appearance settings, it seems that it doesn't.
>
> I set my gnome settings to *hint full*.
> http://img206.imageshack.us/img206/9426/74100265.png, FF 3.1 (on the
> right) is hinting correctly. F 3.5 isn't, it seems to be using *hint
> slight*. Have a look at the gnome taskbar and the FF 3.5 menu bar the
> renderings clearly aren't the same.
>
> Is the hinting hardcoded somewhere?
>
> ProblemType: Bug
> Architecture: amd64
> DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
> NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
> Package: firefox-3.5 3.5~b4~hg20090330r24021+nobinonly-0ubuntu1
> ProcEnviron:
> SHELL=/usr/bin/zsh
> PATH=(custom, user)
> LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
> SourcePackage: firefox-3.5
> Uname: Linux 2.6.28-11-generic x86_64
>

I can confirm that as well.

i think for firefox the gtk way of applying the gnome settings fonts seems to have no effect. e.g. ffox only uses fontconfig.

Confirming the problem and the workaround mentioned solved it.

The workaround did not work for me

another workaround has been posted in this thread on ubuntu forums (post #3):
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1200992
that appears to have positive feedback.

I can confirm the bug and the workarounds mentioned didn't work...

I installed firefox 3.5 through ubuntuzilla. I can confirm the bug and all the workarounds mentioned either here or at ubuntuforums.org don't work as well. I've been playing with the ~/.fonts.conf hinting setting and I see no difference.

Pedro, dont use ubuntuzilla. They use their own cairo which causes theproblem. the archive packages should at least be much better.

I played a bit around and i cannot reproduce the problem for the builds we provide for karmic. It happens with upstream builds only, which probably happens because of a version mismatch of what mozilla builds-in and what we have on the system. Can you confirm that you dont see any difference comparing ffox menu with other gnome app menus?

Alexander: to clarify, ubuntuzilla installs the official mozilla build, so whatever cairo the mozilla guys build with is what gets used. Have you any suggestions how to get proper font hinting when using the mozilla build? Or should this be filed upstream?

Actually, I get this bug even when I compile firefox from source...so, I guess it's not a mozilla build specific bug.

@nanotube: thats only partially correct. upstream build uses system pango and gtk ... both directly use cairo, so you end up having two cairos being used - which from my debugging leads to the moz cairo not seeing the proper XDefaults set by gtk.

@Bhaskar: if you dont explicitly add --enable-system-cairo, then you see the problem the upstream build is experiencing. please check with the packages in archive or daily ppa and let me know if you see it.

2009/7/3 Alexander Sack <email address hidden>

> I played a bit around and i cannot reproduce the problem for the builds
> we provide for karmic. It happens with upstream builds only, which
> probably happens because of a version mismatch of what mozilla builds-in
> and what we have on the system. Can you confirm that you dont see any
> difference comparing ffox menu with other gnome app menus?

the menu in ff 3.5 has the same rendering as the desktop apps, it's only the
content of the page that seems to use a different rendering. can others
confirm?

>
>
> --
> FF 3.5 font hinting
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/379761
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>
> Status in “firefox-3.5” package in Ubuntu: Triaged
>
> Bug description:
> Binary package hint: firefox-3.5
>
> asac, ask that I create a new account and observe if the FF 3.5 uses the
> gnome appearance settings, it seems that it doesn't.
>
> I set my gnome settings to *hint full*.
> http://img206.imageshack.us/img206/9426/74100265.png, FF 3.1 (on the
> right) is hinting correctly. F 3.5 isn't, it seems to be using *hint
> slight*. Have a look at the gnome taskbar and the FF 3.5 menu bar the
> renderings clearly aren't the same.
>
> Is the hinting hardcoded somewhere?
>
> ProblemType: Bug
> Architecture: amd64
> DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
> NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
> Package: firefox-3.5 3.5~b4~hg20090330r24021+nobinonly-0ubuntu1
> ProcEnviron:
> SHELL=/usr/bin/zsh
> PATH=(custom, user)
> LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
> SourcePackage: firefox-3.5
> Uname: Linux 2.6.28-11-generic x86_64
>

@nanotube: ... and yes, file a bug upstream (from what i understand its not the bug mbana has filed this bug for - I adjusted the title accordingly). If you want, file a new bug here too, where we can link the bugzilla bug to and track the progress.

seems to work in FF 3.0.

2009/7/3 Alexander Sack <email address hidden>

> @nanotube: ... and yes, file a bug upstream (from what i understand its
> not the bug mbana has filed this bug for - I adjusted the title
> accordingly). If you want, file a new bug here too, where we can link
> the bugzilla bug to and track the progress.
>
> --
> FF 3.5 font hinting wrong in content area
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/379761
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>
> Status in “firefox-3.5” package in Ubuntu: Triaged
>
> Bug description:
> Binary package hint: firefox-3.5
>
> asac, ask that I create a new account and observe if the FF 3.5 uses the
> gnome appearance settings, it seems that it doesn't.
>
> I set my gnome settings to *hint full*.
> http://img206.imageshack.us/img206/9426/74100265.png, FF 3.1 (on the
> right) is hinting correctly. F 3.5 isn't, it seems to be using *hint
> slight*. Have a look at the gnome taskbar and the FF 3.5 menu bar the
> renderings clearly aren't the same.
>
> Is the hinting hardcoded somewhere?
>
> ProblemType: Bug
> Architecture: amd64
> DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
> NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
> Package: firefox-3.5 3.5~b4~hg20090330r24021+nobinonly-0ubuntu1
> ProcEnviron:
> SHELL=/usr/bin/zsh
> PATH=(custom, user)
> LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
> SourcePackage: firefox-3.5
> Uname: Linux 2.6.28-11-generic x86_64
>

screenshot attached.

url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoization

pango-view -t "avoid repeated calculations - 3.5" --backend=xft
--font="Tahoma 11"

pango-view -t "avoid repeating calculations - 3.0" --backend=cairo
--font="Tahoma 11"

screenshot attached.

url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoization

pango-view -t "avoid repeated calculations - 3.5" --backend=xft
--font="Tahoma 11"

pango-view -t "avoid repeating calculations - 3.0" --backend=cairo
--font="Tahoma 11"

2009/7/3 Mohamed Bana <email address hidden>

> seems to work in FF 3.0.
>
> 2009/7/3 Alexander Sack <email address hidden>
>
>> @nanotube: ... and yes, file a bug upstream (from what i understand its
>>
>> not the bug mbana has filed this bug for - I adjusted the title
>> accordingly). If you want, file a new bug here too, where we can link
>> the bugzilla bug to and track the progress.
>>
>> --
>> FF 3.5 font hinting wrong in content area
>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/379761
>> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
>> of the bug.
>>
>> Status in “firefox-3.5” package in Ubuntu: Triaged
>>
>> Bug description:
>> Binary package hint: firefox-3.5
>>
>> asac, ask that I create a new account and observe if the FF 3.5 uses the
>> gnome appearance settings, it seems that it doesn't.
>>
>> I set my gnome settings to *hint full*.
>> http://img206.imageshack.us/img206/9426/74100265.png, FF 3.1 (on the
>> right) is hinting correctly. F 3.5 isn't, it seems to be using *hint
>> slight*. Have a look at the gnome taskbar and the FF 3.5 menu bar the
>> renderings clearly aren't the same.
>>
>> Is the hinting hardcoded somewhere?
>>
>> ProblemType: Bug
>> Architecture: amd64
>> DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
>> NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
>> Package: firefox-3.5 3.5~b4~hg20090330r24021+nobinonly-0ubuntu1
>> ProcEnviron:
>> SHELL=/usr/bin/zsh
>> PATH=(custom, user)
>> LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
>> SourcePackage: firefox-3.5
>> Uname: Linux 2.6.28-11-generic x86_64
>>
>
>

@Alexander: Yes, I've added the --enable-system-cairo option, and I've also checked with the archives and daily ppa, as you suggested, but the problem is still there.

And also, the menu is also different than other gnome apps. I've added a screenshot.

I am using jaunty 32 bit. The workaround posted on this thread on ubuntu forums (post #3):
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1200992 worked for me.

Jaunty x64 here. Same problem. The .font.conf workaround worked.

The .font.conf made everything consistent for me, but it was all consistently bad :-/

I'm seeing this with 3.5.2+nobinonly-0ubuntu2 on karmic as well.

I'm seeing this with 3.5.2+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.04.1 as well. Workarounds helped but bold fonts are still too dark and ugly. Menu is fine and matches other desktop apps; it's just the content area that is messed up.

See the screenshots in my post here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7805114#post7805114

Oops, my problem may be something different. As explained in my next post in that thread, the difference I am seeing actually has to do with a text-shadow being applied (which FF 3.0 doesn't support). So the text actually IS supposed to be darker (but I still don't think that should make it jaggedy).

Using Karmic same problem, the following workaround fixed it for me:

sudo rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/10*
sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

(from http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=7634222&postcount=12)
The next post claimed that it messed up their Opera fonts... but I think I used the same workaround in Jaunty without any issues.

I just create a symlink for 10-hinting-full.conf and removed 10-hinting-slight.conf on my laptop. Of course, full hinting is my selected option in Appearance Preferences -> Font Rendering Details.

i think the gnome font settings should change all fonts in the system, not only the ones used by gnome.

I also have the same problem in Karmic, see screenshot.

Getting this problem on the Karmic beta, but using the two commands suggested by Nattgew, sorted the problem out and Firefox 3.5 is using the same hinting as the rest of Ubuntu

The apparent culprit is /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-hinting-slight.conf from the binary package fontconfig-config (source package fontconfig); Firefox uses the settings from this file instead of using the desktop's settings. Removing that file brings back the correct behavior (hinting matches desktop). I'm not sure whether this is a bug in Firefox or Fontconfig because other programs do not show this behavior.

Very annoying ideed. Well, that means I still have to tell a newbie to go to the commandline to configure their system, i.e. have their fonts displayed correctly in FF. Same thing happens when installing kde applications in gnome.

So, maybe gnome font settings should -- because they cannot set font hinting for all users in /etc/fonts/conf.d/ -- still write a .fonts.conf in the user directory for those applications that need it?

You could tell them that they have a stable system at the cost of not having latest software versions. ;-)

Or you could tell them that they could download the font.conf from this site: http://blog.bugie.de/?p=312 (german blog) and save that file to their home directory.

Removing /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-hinting-slight.conf (I renamed it) solved the problem in Karmic beta.

@iox, comment 36,
Solving problem for me, thanks!

Will it be fixed for Karmic release? It's a problem many people will suffer, and many of them may not want to look around the web for a hack fixing the issue.

This is another one of those usability issues that smacks users right in the face, and yet it's persisted across multiple versions of Ubuntu. I'm surprised this hasn't been polished by now.

Gannin, please don't troll - this issue is present only in Karmic.

Actually it is on Jaunty too.

Note that there was a similar bug on Hardy with gnome-terminal:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bug/190848

The solution in #28 worked wonders for Firefox 3.5 in the karmic RC, but it kills the font rendering in applications that use qt4 (I think; stuff like VirtualBox, VLC)

Emacs23, which now uses GTK (by default, it seems), is also affected by this bug. As for firefox, I can fix it by properly creating ~/.fonts.conf...

I'm not a GTK guru so I don't know if applications developers have to implement manually the "connection" between font usage and Gnome font configuration or if GTK should do it automatically, but that makes 3 apps I've seen suffering from this problem. And there are probably more.

I have the same problem, too.

The workaround of removing /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-hinting-slight.conf helped me very much, too.

You can also do the following:

Open terminal and type:

gedit ~/.fonts.config

and enter the text:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
 <match target="font">
  <edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
  <edit mode="assign" name="hinting">
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
</fontconfig>

save it and that is all, this should fix the font and Firefox and should not brake the fonts of VLC, VirtualBox or SMPlayer and if the fonts were broken it should fix it....

Post to fix it here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=7616075&postcount=3

The workaround of removing /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-hinting-slight.conf helped me too, but it made VirtualBox fonts worse.
The other workaround of making this ~/.fonts.config file did not work though (do I have to restart system, or logout to make it work?).

Sorry, forgot to mention I have Karmic final version, upgraded from Jaunty.

dhenry, could you please describe how to create properly ~/.fonts.conf? Thanks :)

The solution described here worked for me: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1200992 (it's a little longer content for .fonts.conf). That also makes VirtualBox fonts much smoother (like the system fonts in general).

I attached the fonts.conf that solves the problem (at least for me). It is the same as mentionned in the above comment (i.e., fonts.conf taken from ubuntuforums). Note that I haven't tested it with virtual box. Note also that it solves the same problem for emacs23.

Don't forget to add the dot at the begining of the file name: ".fonts.conf"

I fixed it by doing the following:

$ sudo rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-hinting-slight.conf
$ sudo ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.avail/10-hinting-medium.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

Qt apps and the like were none the worse for it.

I used the method mentioned earlier as the problem still exists in the release version of Karmic.

sudo rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/10*
sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

Everything looks much better so far but I haven't tested all my applications yet. This is a serious bug that needs to be addressed as most new users will not understand the issue. Their perception of a our new flagship version of the OS is key to overall adoption.

I tried the method above and found that fonts in QT apps looked terrible. I used the ~/.fonts.conf method and that works great. All applications look much better.

http://lyncis.info/en/post/189

Above article describes the problem well and solves it both for QT apps and FF 3.5 in Karmic.

I personally think full hinting should be the default as that is the only option to get the fonts in Ubuntu to even remotely resemble quality font rendering.

All I read are, IMHO, workarounds, but not more.

The problem lies with the fact that, even though firefox-3.5 honors font configuration as configured by fontconfig-config (/etc/fonts/conf.d, ~/.font.conf, etc.), GNOME does not use the same system to configure fonts, or at least font hinting. It seems KDE does (see bug #390975 (dupe)).

Is this a firefox bug? Or a gnome bug? Maybe neither. I don't know the considerations of gnome to not use fontconfig-config, but I think they want to keep all configuration in gconf?

Maybe this should be a feature in firefox-3.5-gnome-support?

Well, the truth as always lies somewhere between.

In fact font hinting may be set on per-application basis using Xft X resources. So any program you start up ends up with thsis Xft resources set up, no matter are the settings for font hinting set in .font.conf, in gconf or in .Xdefaults/.Xresources. The method of setting this up is up to implementator. KDE's way is to use .font.conf settings as the source for defaults. Gnome's way is to store this in gconf and commit them to X on the system startup/settings change program initialization/ This gets done by gnome-settings-daemon.

Firefox uses GTK+ as it's rendering backend on linux. But firefox by itself isn't a Gnome application - the only thing (well, almost) that is used from Gnome is widget engine and file chooser dialog. It is perfectly normal for firefox to be set up on a system without gnome-settings-daemon installed/running, and in such cases GTK+ appearence is contolled by .gtkrc files instead of gconfd/gnome-settings-daemon.

And here we come to a problem/bug described in this ticket: firefox-3.0 font hinting Xft X resources were controlled by gnome-settings-daemon, while firefox-3.5 don't. My proposal is that firefox-3.5 controls this settings by itself fetching defaults from .font.conf, and simply ignores gconf-settings-daemon's attemps to change them. It this proposal is right, then it shoud be fixed by upstream (mozilla.org), either by reverting firefox behaviour to the 3.0's state, or by adding special item to about:config which will allow to control whether shoud firefox read .fonts.conf and use it or not.

How about my proposal to fix this in the firefox-3.5-gnome-support? This would allow the behaviour to be controlled by a plugin / component, without touching the firefox core. Of course, the firefox core should allow this to be controlled from within a plugin / component, which might require changes to be done upstream.

Your proposal is good, but it needs upstream fix to firefox-3.5 to allow "the behaviour to be controlled by a plugin / component".
And keep in mind, that I hadn't done any extensive research concerning firefox-3.5 behavior comparing with firefox-3.0, so my proposals about the core of the bug might be wrong.

Firefox-3.5 will not have any new features/core changes.
Firefox-3.6 can still have these changes. Can you please file a bug upstream and post the link here.

Same problem in Thunderbird 3.0. fontconfig / .fonts.conf solution is not any help, same with gnome settings. I'm not sure what to do next.

I can confirm 3.5.6 still has issue.
I am on 9.10 64bit and I tried almost any workaround with no luck.
What is embarassing is that new Chrome have tons of less issues that FF.... no fonts issue, flash player works great , java apllet also do their job..
Is there a plan for solving that?

Thanks

Andrea

I can reproduce this on Lucid Lynx Alpha 2, with the built in Firefox 3.5.7.

Confirming workaround in #57 worked for me in karmic

sorry for my bad english.

I found the only method to fix the hinting issue in karmic for firefox, thunderbird, (and maybe openoffice) is compiling (buildind) with cairo option activated, that is with these two rows in .mozconfig file:

ac_add_options --enable-default-toolkit=cairo-gtk2
ac_add_options --enable-system-cairo

I use the .font.conf file method too.

bye

Adding tracking task for Firefox 3.6+

really hope this gets fixed for lucid. slight hinting looks really, really bad (why is it the default?) whereas full hinting looks acceptable.

After upgrading my Karmic to Lucid Beta 1 today, this bug reappeared. I need to remove /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-hinting-slight.conf by hand in order to fix it, as I did six months ago during Jaunty->Karmic upgrading :(.

I don't understand why this bug is considered to be a firefox bug as it is clearly a bug of the application we use to change the font settings. Non-gnome applications like firefox or qt4 based applications rely on .fonts.conf for the font hinting configuration instead of pulling parameters from gconf. So is this file not created or modified when the user configures this?

Gnome bug?

INHO it is indeed a GNOME bug.

Having a consistently-looking GNOME desktop means that you should address also the non-GNOME applications. Since ages, local font settings for Unix-class applications are in ~/.fonts.config, but alas, GNOME has no intention to modify this file.

Self-centered desktop environments should think twice about their raison d'être.

Now, how many years will take to GNOME3 to add a mechanism to duplicate the gconf settings in .gtkrc and .fonts.config?

No reason to have firefox-3.5 since we no longer use versioning.

You don't user versioning (whatever that is) so you won't fix this bug ?!?

This is a long time bug, but it is still unsolved.

New Ubuntu look, themes and whatever are important stuff but a decent font hinting in the most impostant application in more urgent, I think.

This is "desktop experience" too.

ditto.

—Mohamed

On 26 March 2010 22:48, Guiodic (Guido Iodice) <email address hidden>wrote:

> This is a long time bug, but it is still unsolved.
>
> New Ubuntu look, themes and whatever are important stuff but a decent
> font hinting in the most impostant application in more urgent, I think.
>
> This is "desktop experience" too.
>
> --
> MASTER - FF 3.5 font hinting does not honour gnome-settings
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/379761
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>
> Status in “firefox” package in Ubuntu: Triaged
> Status in “firefox-3.5” package in Ubuntu: Won't Fix
> Status in “fontconfig” package in Ubuntu: New
>
> Bug description:
> Binary package hint: firefox-3.5
>
> asac, ask that I create a new account and observe if the FF 3.5 uses the
> gnome appearance settings, it seems that it doesn't.
>
> I set my gnome settings to *hint full*.
> http://img206.imageshack.us/img206/9426/74100265.png, FF 3.1 (on the
> right) is hinting correctly. F 3.5 isn't, it seems to be using *hint
> slight*. Have a look at the gnome taskbar and the FF 3.5 menu bar the
> renderings clearly aren't the same.
>
> Is the hinting hardcoded somewhere?
>
> ProblemType: Bug
> Architecture: amd64
> DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
> NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
> Package: firefox-3.5 3.5~b4~hg20090330r24021+nobinonly-0ubuntu1
> ProcEnviron:
> SHELL=/usr/bin/zsh
> PATH=(custom, user)
> LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
> SourcePackage: firefox-3.5
> Uname: Linux 2.6.28-11-generic x86_64
>
> To unsubscribe from this bug, go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/379761/+subscribe
>

Agreed. This bug should be fixed and it should be a papercut. Nice crisp, unified fonts are a must. Pretty exterior is fine and dandy but I deal with fonts in everything I do on a computer. I forget about my window borders, DE, wallpaper, etc., in my day to day but not my fonts! Having to edit ~/.fonts.conf on my Ubuntu machines when I don't have to on my Debian machines makes no sense. What is Ubuntu doing differently? Also anyone noticed that the fonts of certain sites are also quite fuzzy such as Facebook on Ubuntu but not on Windows, e.g.

Also this bug is still present on Firefox-3.6 so

status: Triaged → Won't Fix

should be changed and this should be upped to 3.6 as I'm on lucid and am still experiencing this.

This bug has not been fixed in Firefox 3.6 Mozilla Firefox for Ubuntu canonical - 1.0
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de; rv:1.9.2; Gecko/20100308 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6

the task "firefox" is for 3.6 we no longer use anything after the word firefox.

@asac:

Sorry it took me so long to reply, here's a little bit about the history of the patch.

The subpixel patch that ubuntu is currently using was added to cairo master during the 1.8.0 cycle, but then dropped shortly before the release [1], essentially because of concerns over the test suite failing on some systems. Ubuntu (and debian, I think) simply reverted the revert, and have been shipping the patch in their cairo ever since, without any issues that I know of. There have been several attempts to re-introduce the feature, the last one this January [2,3], but they have never resulted in a new patch, partly because it is not clear how upstream wants to solve this (Carl is quite unreasonable on this issue, in my opinion). See also the upstream bug.

The patch is very well-tested and the outcome is generally preferred to the legacy filter, so it's hard to imagine mozilla rejecting it.

[1] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/cairo/commit/?id=5d887ad5dca5af0f8216830d1b04d08a5aba9bee
[2] http://lists.cairographics.org/archives/cairo/2010-January/018778.html
[3] http://lists.cairographics.org/archives/cairo/2010-January/018870.html
[4] http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10301

Please ignore the last comment, I meant to add it to bug #512615. Sorry about the noise.

As a workaround, I have been using a self-made script in python to make .fonts.conf follow gconf settings.

I've added it to session startup scripts for watching for changes in gconf and writting a new version of ~/.fonts.conf according to the new values whenever settings are modified.

An ugly solution but works for me.

I've done the math and it's 22 days to go. That's not much time. Today's system update (Firefox included) didn't change anything - fonts in Firefox are still unreadable. I hope it won't be another "fix-it-yourself" thing in LTS release.

If gnome-appearance-properties tool can't set font settings for whole system, Lucid Lynx should NOT be released (if problem is not fixed at 29th). I think that having stable LTS release without this kind of bugs is far more important then keeping given release date (29th of April). I hope I'm not the only one with this opinion.

I agree, for the default browser, which may be the most used app for a
lot of people, bad fonts is a pretty bad bug. I tried the same fix in
Lucid and Chrome still looks much better than Firefox.

FF 3.6.3 in Lucid Beta 2 is unaffected.

I can confirm that FF in lucid honors the font hinting, but not the smoothing (bug #559149).

I just upgraded to 10.04 this morning and I'm seeing broken hinting until I use the .fonts.conf workaround.

I can also confirm this bug in Lucid on several machines. Hinting is broken until the .fonts.conf workaround is applied.

This is still an issue, so it shouldn't really be closed. I've been investigating this for the last few days, and can see why Firefox is doing this now

Can we please not mix multiple products on the same bug. This bug is about font configuration in firefox rather than chromium (without investigating in depth, it might be a completely unrelated issue in chromium)

In Firefox 3.6.6 Lucid 32-bit, the workaround from this thread worked: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1128929&page=5

> In a previous page of this thread, amn108 wrote:
>
> Funny i just removed all /etc/files/conf.d/10-* and after that
> "dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig" and Firefox 3.5 started to obey
> my Gnome text rendering ways. That is all it took.

I have my GNOME font options set to No hinting + Grayscale antialiasing, and the defaults in /etc/fonts/conf.d say hinting-slight.

Just my 2 cents.

I am using Firefox 3.6.10 in Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 Beta. I was able to solve[1] this problem by adjusting the files in /etc/fonts/conf.d/ to reflect my GNOME font settings (in my case, I use full hinting):

cd /etc/fonts/conf.d/
sudo rm 10-hinting-slight.conf
sudo ln -s ../conf.avail/10-hinting-full.conf
sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

[1] http://www.ubuntu-inside.me/2009/07/howto-fix-firefox-35s-font-hinting.html

I seem to be having the same issues. Not sure. None of the solutions (offered above or at the Ubuntu Forum) have worked for me. I'm using 10.10 (RC AMD64) with Firefox 3.6.10. The problem also affects Thunderbird, predictably enough. The new Ubuntu font renders correctly in everything *but* Mozilla's software (so far). It appears "spindly" (as if it needed to be bolded). Other Fonts exhibit the same behaviour. One exceptions so far - Britannica Unicode Sans Roman renders correctly in the Desktop *and* Firefox.

Solution in comment #28 help for me.
I setup fonts in appearance settings and then make

sudo rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/10*
sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

Fonts in qt-based packages looks like in other gtk packages.
Ubuntu 10.10 amd64.

Confirm continued existence of this problem in Lucid.

None of the fixes suggested above worked.

I'm using no hinting and it's impossible to exactly match Chrome's fonts.
Will this be ever fixed?

I can confirm #28 still works. Maybe these files should be removed from ubuntu. Please fix, it's getting on my nerves.