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firefox 44.02 ignores my Japanese bitmap font, please tell me how to fix

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  • Last reply by kornelis

kornelis
kornelis
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Today I noticed my Japanese bitmap font is no longer used. I used to select it through a style rule in userContent.css, but now it is being ignored.

The font is also gone from the fontlist at Edit / Preferences / Content / Fonts & colors / Advanced, so, I also can't select it as primary font.

The font contains both Japanese and Latin gliphs, but I used to use as second font with a style rule because the Latin gliphs are not so nice (the Japanese gliphs are at 16 very sharp however, which is why I use it).

Other gtk programs still show the font. Fontconfig is not changed and still allows bitmap fonts. Yes, I am on Linux.

Please advise.

Thanks.

Edit:

I checked another bitmap font that I used to use, a Chinese bitmap font. Same problem. It's also not a language problem, the default universal bitmap font Fixed is invisible in Firefox also.

Edit:

I downgraded to version 43. That restored Firefox's ability to display my bitmap fonts. That also seems to prove that it is really something that has changed in Firefox.

Today I noticed my Japanese bitmap font is no longer used. I used to select it through a style rule in userContent.css, but now it is being ignored. The font is also gone from the fontlist at Edit / Preferences / Content / Fonts & colors / Advanced, so, I also can't select it as primary font. The font contains both Japanese and Latin gliphs, but I used to use as second font with a style rule because the Latin gliphs are not so nice (the Japanese gliphs are at 16 very sharp however, which is why I use it). Other gtk programs still show the font. Fontconfig is not changed and still allows bitmap fonts. Yes, I am on Linux. Please advise. Thanks. ---- Edit: I checked another bitmap font that I used to use, a Chinese bitmap font. Same problem. It's also not a language problem, the default universal bitmap font Fixed is invisible in Firefox also. ---- Edit: I downgraded to version 43. That restored Firefox's ability to display my bitmap fonts. That also seems to prove that it is really something that has changed in Firefox.

Modified by kornelis

All Replies (4)

kornelis
kornelis Question owner
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Priyansu Ganguly tweeted me “We'll look for a solution to that in the upcoming versions”.

That would mean that there’s is no fix in the current version, and people that use CJK bitmap fonts for readability are stuck on version 43 indefinitely.

Now I’m really curious why support for bitmap fonts was dropped in the first place...

Modified by kornelis

cor-el
cor-el
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See:

  • bug 1244212 - firefox ignores fontconfig font family preferences since 44.0
  • bug 1243194 - Firefox does not allow me to select a bitmap font as the default

Please do not comment in bug reports
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html

cor-el
cor-el
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Try to set this pref to false on the about:config page.

  • gfx.font_rendering.fontconfig.fontlist.enabled = false

You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. You can accept the warning and click "I'll be careful" to continue.

kornelis
kornelis Question owner
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Disabling the, what seems to be new ‘fontconfig backend’ (gfx.font_rendering.fontconfig.fontlist.enabled to false in about:config), restores the display of bitmap fonts.

Edit: No, it doesn’t solve it entirely. It loads my style rule in userContent.css, but it seems to ignore style rules in online stylesheets. Weird. Also, it’s still not in the Fonts & Colors list, I can’t select it as default font for Japanese pages (which is possible in version 43). It seems more is broken that just that backend.


Unfortunately that seems to be a temporary fix:

> .....be aware that this workaround (i.e. the older fontconfig backend) is likely to be removed from the codebase at some point (in the fairly near future). We won't want to maintain two separate versions of the code indefinitely... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1243194#c9

From this I understand that is not unlikely that bitmap support for Linux will be dropped entirely (the tweet by Priyansu Ganguly gave me some hope, but he tweets a lot of standard replies and this may have been one of those).

I really liked how Firefox (until 43) was able to display a bitmap font at it’s optimal size, and switch to a scalable font as soon as the font size was smaller or larger. Yes, today scalable fonts for about every language may exist (although I’m not entirely certain about that), but the majority of all those TTF are really bad, especially CJK fonts. On platforms like MS-Windows, that are very much optimized for the fonts that they create for themselves, this is less of a problem, but on Linux there is both less optimization and are there less fancy TTF fonts available. That’s why I use a Japanese bitmap font for easy reading.

As a user it seems to me that, since Linux is a very different platform with many different distributions and adaptations, it might not be best to assume that it’s fine to drop bitmap support for Linux as soon as MS-Windows appears to have done so.

For those interested, I will try to link to a comparison TTF bitmap Japanese font screenshot. Even if you don't know Japanese, you might be able to see why I like reading using the latter.

Compariston default Japanese TTF and bitmap.

Modified by kornelis