Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2017 17:45:25 +0100 From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> To: Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Poor default fonts in Firefox Message-ID: <20171227174525.cc1e9047.freebsd@edvax.de> In-Reply-To: <slrnp47hdu.189a.naddy@lorvorc.mips.inka.de> References: <slrnp47hdu.189a.naddy@lorvorc.mips.inka.de>
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On Wed, 27 Dec 2017 16:09:34 -0000 (UTC), Christian Weisgerber wrote: > You install a new FreeBSD machine with a graphics display, install > the xorg and firefox ports on it, all default options, start browsing > the web... and you see that some sites (e.g. http://www.bbc.com/news) > are presented with pixelated fonts like something out of the 1990s. > > What do you do? You install the recommended font packages. :-) Yes, xorg itself comes with certain fonts, but thpse aren't really suitable for web browsing. adding the webfonts package improves visual presentation a lot. > This affects approximately everybody who uses FreeBSD on a desktop > or laptop, and it has for years. What's the standard solution, and > why doesn't this work out of the box? As nentioned, installing fonts is the solution. The reason why they aren't there by default is that the web browsers don't define fonts as a dependency. And don't just consider the "everyone speaks and writes in English" mentality. If you visit web pages that have japanese or chinese characters and symbols, you'd additionally need zh-CJKUnifonts installed. There is no automatish that does this - except you visit web pages that download fonts from Google to be used. By the way, the same applies to office suites. Installing additional fonts, either via ports, or manually (TT fonts), is often an improvement. > The underlying problem is that certain popular font names, "Helvetica", > "Times", "Courier", are mapped to ancient bitmap fonts by default, e.g.: > $ fc-match Helvetica > helvR12-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz: "Helvetica" "Regular" Yes, this is the common fallback to at least allow the presentation of the text, but the fonts chosen for this purpose are usually "basic quality" (read: you can read them, but they don't look that nice). And considering the CJK problem again, there is no such mapping, so what you see is just Klotz Klotz Klotz Klotz. :-) > My personal solution for the last few years has been to pinch > OpenBSD's etc/fonts/conf.avail/31-nonmst.conf file... > https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/xenocara/dist/fontconfig/conf.d/31-nonmst.conf?rev=1.1&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup > ... that maps these font names to DejaVu Sans/Serif/Sans Mono. > Still, that seems hackish and can hardly be expected from your > average user. This isn't needed as soon as the webfonts package has been installed. And even the DejaVu fonts need to be installed manually, if I remember correctly. Depending on what you need, manually installing other font packages is also suggest. Here is a little selection from a typical desktop machine, used for web browsing, office suites, and typesetting: cantarell-fonts cyberbit-ttfonts droid-fonts-ttf ecofont figlet-fonts font-adobe font-adobe font-adobe-utopia font-adobe-utopia font-adobe-utopia-type1 font-alias font-amsfonts font-arabic-misc font-bh font-bh font-bh-lucidatypewriter font-bh-lucidatypewriter font-bh-ttf font-bh-type1 font-bitstream font-bitstream font-bitstream-type1 font-cronyx-cyrillic font-cursor-misc font-daewoo-misc font-dec-misc font-ibm-type1 font-isas-misc font-jis-misc font-micro-misc font-misc-cyrillic font-misc-ethiopic font-misc-meltho font-misc-misc font-mutt-misc font-schumacher-misc font-screen-cyrillic font-sony-misc font-sun-misc font-util font-winitzki-cyrillic font-xfree86-type1 fontcacheproto fontconfig fontsproto freefont-ttf freefonts gsfonts libXfont libXfontcache libfontenc linux-f10-fontconfig mkfontdir mkfontscale urwfonts urwfonts-ttf webfonts <---- important! xf86bigfontproto xfontsel xorg-fonts xorg-fonts xorg-fonts xorg-fonts-cyrillic xorg-fonts-miscbitmaps xorg-fonts-truetype xorg-fonts-type1 zh-CJKUnifonts -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
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