Mozilla Font Funny Business

[sechs]

While we're at it...

About a week ago, I was messing around with my fonts in Windows, replacing older Type 1 and TrueType fonts with nicer looking OpenType ones. After doing this, Firefox started substituting the serif fonts on the New York Times website with an outline sans serif font which I could not identify. Internet Explorer did not do this.

After messing with the font settings in Firefox and the font substitutions in the Windows registry, I eventually ended up deleting the Time New Roman font set (which I substituted with a nicer looking OTP version). Firefox started using Helvetica Narrow (one of my remaining Type 1 fonts and sans serif) instead, but normally, not as an outline. Once again Internet Explorer does not do this.

Looking at the page source, the text is tagged with the font face as "Times New Roman,Times,Serif." I should be getting a serif font, but I'm not.

I noticed yesterday that Amazon.com is doing the same thing. The CSS in the pages calls for certain text to be "Times,serif," yet it comes out as Helvetica Narrow. Text which is tagged as sans serif (which is most of the web site) comes out correctly -- with the sans serif font that I've chosen in preferences.

What could be going on here for Firefox to substitute a font which is not called for in its settings, the web page, or Windows' font substitution?

 

[sechs]

Solved (kind of)

After fidling with font settings in Firefox this evening, I've discovered that it doesn't seem to like some (but not all) of the OpenType fonts with PostScript outlines. It seems fine with PostScript fonts.

Any theories on this?

 

[jtr1962]

Knowing what I know about fonts, which I'll grant isn't much, my guess is that the rendering engine in Firefox can't deal with some of your fonts so it defaults to what it considers the closest substitute. Of course, the substitute is wrong as you've discovered.

I had a similar problem once in Word where it was making font substitutions which were nothing like the original. It was so long ago though that I don't remember the specifics.

 

[sechs]

Why would Firefox render fonts? That's the job of Windows' font engines.

And even if it were Firefox, why would it be some fonts but not others? Very perplexing....

 

[i]

And even if it were Firefox, why would it be some fonts but not others?

To enable consistent portability across a maximum number of platforms?

Surely part of what Gecko handles is font rendering?

 

[i]

Whoops, I quoted the wrong question.

Why would Firefox render fonts?

To enable consistent portability across a maximum number of platforms?

Surely part of what Gecko handles is font rendering?

 

[sechs]

Furthur investigation has found that none of the fancy-pants fonts from the Adobe OpenType font library work. Type 1 fonts are fine. TrueType fonts are fine.

At the moment, I'm following others who are having issues with Helvetica being replaced by Arial upon display. That issue seems to be Windows-specific; go figure.