[RndTbl] Fwd: Re: firefox font weirdness?

[Adam Thompson]

Not of very much help, but FF 123.0 Win64 renders it fine on my desktop.  I don't have any UNIX(et al.) desktops at the moment.
-Adam

-----Original Message-----
From: Trevor Cordes <trevor at tecnopolis.ca> 
Sent: Saturday, March 9, 2024 8:29 PM
To: Adam Thompson <athompso at athompso.net>
Cc: Continuation of Round Table discussion <roundtable at muug.ca>; Hartmut W Sager <hwsager at marityme.net>
Subject: Re: [RndTbl] Fwd: Re: firefox font weirdness?

On 2024-03-09 Adam Thompson wrote:
> ...that should be simple to recreate on a public, static HTML page
> hosted on some webserver you manage, no?  And if it's not simple,
> perhaps the bug has been misidentified. The rendering stack is pretty

Oh no, that means work! :-)

https://tecnopolis.ca/fonttest.html

Interesting: all it takes to trigger the bug is a textarea with a
font-family style.  (See source)

You can test the textarea on that page, and see the results in a
screenshot from my browser showing the bug.

I find it very strange that all the families specified appear to be
mono, yet clearly the font selected is not mono (see the wwmmi line).
It *is* the same font as is being selected on the real website, and
it's almost an identical result... except for the
numbers-lighter-color-than-letters which doesn't seem to be recreated
with this simplified example.

The main thing here is the wrong font being used, *and* the crazy line
spacing when letters are present!  Insane!  Looks perfectly fine on
Chromium.  And you should see what it does to underscored lines!  Look
at the spacing between the 123 and 456 vs the other lines.  Those
aren't extra NL's I've inserted!!

> deep - there's *at least* five or six layers in between the TTF on
> disk and the pixels on screen, probably more, any of them could be
> the problem.  e.g. is this a FF issue, a font issue, a libttf (or
> whatever is called today) issue, a Cairo issue... Is it even just a
> CSS interaction issue? Good luck.  This harkens bank to the bad old
> days of crappy font rendering on Linux.

Ya, it smells like firefox, but could be other layers.  Luckily I
noticed it right away because I use this site every day.  But I checked
the other stuff you mentioned and Cairo hasn't been updated for months,
and there doesn't seem to be any lib with ttf in the name anymore, so
who knows.  If ldd still means anything anymore, it looks like firefox
is compiled with almost everything static on Fedora.

I guess with a simple test case I can submit a report to FF now... if
someone can maybe test on their versions of FF and either me-too or
not-me, along with their version #.  I'd love to a) hear that <123 =
not-me and b) 123 = me-too.