Wine fonts makes html rendering on firefox and chrome much worse

[fernando]

Hi there,

Please someone help me find out how to solve this problem: for some weeks I
have been experiencing problems with fonts on Firefox and Chrome when
acessing two different webmail systems. At first I though the problem was
caused by remi RPMs I used to install Firefox 4 on Fedora 14. I installed
Fedora 15 and everything was fine for a while, and then fonts became
strange again. When firefox started having font problems, Google Chrome
started also.

The problem was: Bold fonts and regular fonts look almost the same. Bold
fonts had a wider average character width, but were not thicker.

So I got another computer, installed Fedora 15 from scratch, and compared
the results. Everything fine. Updated all packages, including rpmfusion
ones. Also fine.

Then I noticed the new system was missing some packages I use, I guess they
come from rpmfusion: gnome-mplayer and wine. After installing those, the
font problem in Firefox and Chrome was back again.

But this time I saved the output of rpm -qa at each step, then I compared
the latest working state with the one that wasn't. I noticed there are a
number of wine-*-fonts packages, and removed then (I also had to remove
wine itself). Problem solved!

Can anyone explain why either wine itself (or wine fonts) interfere with
web browser page rendering?

And how can I re-install wine without messing up with web page fonts?
[]s, Fernando Lozano


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[Konstantin Svist]

Post by fernando
Hi there,
Please someone help me find out how to solve this problem: for some
weeks I have been experiencing problems with fonts on Firefox and
Chrome when acessing two different webmail systems. At first I though
the problem was caused by remi RPMs I used to install Firefox 4 on
Fedora 14. I installed Fedora 15 and everything was fine for a while,
and then fonts became strange again. When firefox started having font
problems, Google Chrome started also.
The problem was: Bold fonts and regular fonts look almost the same.
Bold fonts had a wider average character width, but were not thicker.
So I got another computer, installed Fedora 15 from scratch, and
compared the results. Everything fine. Updated all packages, including
rpmfusion ones. Also fine.
Then I noticed the new system was missing some packages I use, I guess
they come from rpmfusion: gnome-mplayer and wine. After installing
those, the font problem in Firefox and Chrome was back again.
But this time I saved the output of rpm -qa at each step, then I
compared the latest working state with the one that wasn't. I noticed
there are a number of wine-*-fonts packages, and removed then (I also
had to remove wine itself). Problem solved!
Can anyone explain why either wine itself (or wine fonts) interfere
with web browser page rendering?
And how can I re-install wine without messing up with web page fonts?

Write the contents of this into ~/.fonts.conf and you won't need to
remove wine :
http://pastebin.com/rxSjKaF6

[Tim]

Post by fernando
I noticed the new system was missing some packages I use, I guess they
come from rpmfusion: gnome-mplayer and wine. After installing those,
the font problem in Firefox and Chrome was back again.
But this time I saved the output of rpm -qa at each step, then I
compared the latest working state with the one that wasn't. I noticed
there are a number of wine-*-fonts packages, and removed then (I also
had to remove wine itself). Problem solved!
Can anyone explain why either wine itself (or wine fonts) interfere
with web browser page rendering?

Most likely, because the wine supplied fonts were a better match
(name-wise, or otherwise) for the fonts requested in the web pages, even
if they render horribly. I've always avoided installing any Microsoft
fonts, for that reason (they nearly always look horrid).

For example, if a webpage says to use Tahoma for the body text, your
system will either try to use it (if it's installed), or find an
alternative (based on a list of alternatives supplied by the website, or
a list of alternatives configured on your computer - there's some by
default, and you can add your own).

The original font mayn't render well on Linux, since it was designed for
the text-rendering scheme used on Windows, which (probably) works
differently than ours. An alternative mayn't render well for being a
different size (i.e. the original Microsoft was oversized, so the page
author specified it to be used at a smaller than normal size; your
alternative is normal sized, normally, but the page has it rendered at a
miniature font size). You can play with configuring minimum font sizes
in your browser, but that can make everything too big.

Post by fernando
And how can I re-install wine without messing up with web page fonts?

Konstantin Svist's solution is probably the only way: It causes Linux
to reject the use of some of those wine fonts. Though that makes those
fonts unusable for anything that asks for them.

An alternative solution is to use user style sheets with your web
browser, to force the use of your own fonts, rather than what the
website wants you to use. However, that has its drawbacks that some
websites will depend on being able to pick their own fonts and font
sizes, to fit the text into the layout of their page. And you find
yourself trying to read pages with overlapping text, or only half the
height of the characters being visible inside HTML form gadgets, or
other similarly annoying issues.

There's no all-purpose always-good solution to this.