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goetzkluge

Member

From: Munich

Registered: 2009-05-05

Posts: 60

Website

Ugly font in Firefox after upgrade of fontconfig(?) in late Nov. 2009

Since late November (a few days ago) the fonts used in my Firefox menues and for some content (e.g. Wikipedia and ArchWiki) are simple bitmap fonts without smoothening. The fonts used for the pages of this forum are not affected.

Perhaps Firefonx looks for a link which now points to a different font or to nowhere?

The Midori browser still works fine as previously. Up to now I did not run into ugly fonts in other applications, e.g. Thunderbird is not affected. So this perhaps is a Firefox issue rather than a fontconfig issue, although, as far as I remember, the change happened after a recent upgrade of fontconfig (late November 2009?). There was an info message that configuration files in /etc/fonts/local are not used any more (?).

I run "fc-cache -vf" just in case, but no improvement.

Any idea what I can do to get back to "smoother" fonts?

Best regards from Munich
Goetz

PS: Unfortunately I am back to newbie status. That is why I post in the newbie categorie. I configured my ArchLinux comfortably and then just used it for a long time to run applications for work. (Until now there only was one surprise after a Kernel update which I could fix thanks to good documentation and a warning on the ArchLinux site.) So I forgot some of the skills which I learned when I installed this nice distribution. In future I will take more care and write down what I did. I backup my data, but once my old PC crashes, I will have to install Archlinux again (because I like it and stopped looking for alternatives). So I am a bit afraid that I have go through the learning curve again. This is about the only thing which troubles me with Achlinux, but it's my mistake. So I don't blame the maintainers.

Last edited by goetzkluge (2009-12-03 15:21:33)

goetzkluge

Member

From: Munich

Registered: 2009-05-05

Posts: 60

Website

Re: Ugly font in Firefox after upgrade of fontconfig(?) in late Nov. 2009

Any hints? This problem occured after an upgrade with pacman (rolling upgrade).

Last edited by goetzkluge (2009-12-05 11:29:31)

Harlequin

Member

Registered: 2009-07-28

Posts: 25

Re: Ugly font in Firefox after upgrade of fontconfig(?) in late Nov. 2009

If only some pages are affected, you can try to deselect the "Allow pages using their fonts instead of mine selection" option in preferences>content>fonts>advanced. Maybe that helps.

goetzkluge

Member

From: Munich

Registered: 2009-05-05

Posts: 60

Website

Re: Ugly font in Firefox after upgrade of fontconfig(?) in late Nov. 2009

If only some pages are affected...

Hi Harlequin,

Thanks for the info. However, the Firefox menu is affected too although I did not change the settings of Firefox. Perhaps a recent uptate of ArchLinux changed the fonts which are associated with "serif' and "sans serif"?

Best regards from Munich
Goetz

Harlequin

Member

Registered: 2009-07-28

Posts: 25

Re: Ugly font in Firefox after upgrade of fontconfig(?) in late Nov. 2009

Ok if even the menu is affected forget about my post
Did you try with a new profile? And which DE do you use? if its kde, try to deactivate qt-gtk-engine or whatever you have running to make gtk apps look native.

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: Ugly font in Firefox after upgrade of fontconfig(?) in late Nov. 2009

Try recompiling fontconfig 2.7.3, to confirm that the cause is the fontconfig version.