Funky Fonts: IE OK; MS Word OK, Chrome NG, FireFox NG

I posted something like this a bunch of months ago, but an answer never
emerged.

viz: http://tinyurl.com/zfl42xr

Briefly: for some web sites, the font(s) look fuzzy.

For the current problem site (quora.com), the fonts look A-OK under IE
11 and they look A-OK if I paste the page's contents into MS Word.

But under both Chrome and FireFox the fonts look quite ragged. Same
deal with a browser called "Iron".

Seems like all browsers should be working out of the same pool of fonts,
right?

Maybe it's time for me to stop trying to fool Mother Nature and just
revert to IE....

Can anybody shed some light?
--
Pete Cresswell

(PeteCresswell) wrote:
I posted something like this a bunch of months ago, but an answer never
emerged.

viz: http://tinyurl.com/zfl42xr

Briefly: for some web sites, the font(s) look fuzzy.

For the current problem site (quora.com), the fonts look A-OK under IE
11 and they look A-OK if I paste the page's contents into MS Word.

But under both Chrome and FireFox the fonts look quite ragged. Same
deal with a browser called "Iron".

Seems like all browsers should be working out of the same pool of fonts,
right?

Maybe it's time for me to stop trying to fool Mother Nature and just
revert to IE....

Can anybody shed some light?

IE 8, FF27, and SM 2.26 all give me a black screen with no words.

On 2/19/2017 12:04 PM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
I posted something like this a bunch of months ago, but an answer never
emerged.

viz: http://tinyurl.com/zfl42xr

Briefly: for some web sites, the font(s) look fuzzy.

For the current problem site (quora.com), the fonts look A-OK under IE
11 and they look A-OK if I paste the page's contents into MS Word.

But under both Chrome and FireFox the fonts look quite ragged. Same
deal with a browser called "Iron".

Seems like all browsers should be working out of the same pool of fonts,
right?

Maybe it's time for me to stop trying to fool Mother Nature and just
revert to IE....

Can anybody shed some light?


Windows 7 Ultimate
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:49.0) Gecko/20100101 SeaMonkey/2.46

Since SeaMonkey uses the same Gecko rendering engine as Firefox, I
expect the same results.

The actual text fonts -- not the fonts in images -- at
https://www.quora.com/ are not funky at all. They are Arial and
Georgia and appear quite sharp. Georgia in particular is known to be
sharp and easily read both on a computer monitor and printed on hard
copy. The images of text on that page are also sharp.

Yes, the text at http://tinyurl.com/zfl42xr is very poor. However,
that could easily be the result of your doing a screen print and pasting
the result into an image file that has too few pixels inch (72).

--
David E. Ross
http://www.rossde.com/

Paraphrasing Mark Twain, who was quoting someone else:
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and
alternative truths.

On Sun, 19 Feb 2017 15:04:42 -0500, "(PeteCresswell)"
wrote:

I posted something like this a bunch of months ago, but an answer never
emerged.

An answer did emerge, and it's still the same - it was not to bother
with tart's make-up that adds nothing to the content of a website.
It's CONTENT that matters, not unnecessary glitter that accomplishes
nothing except making a page more difficult to read, making it less
accessible, slowing page-loading, and consuming unnecessary bandwidth
and computer resources.

Use the fonts supplied by the browser.
--
================================================== ======
Please always reply to ng as the email in this post's
header does not exist. Or use a contact address at:
http://www.macfh.co.uk/JavaJive/JavaJive.html
http://www.macfh.co.uk/Macfarlane/Macfarlane.html

"(PeteCresswell)" wrote in message
...

|I posted something like this a bunch of months ago, but an answer never
| emerged.
|
| viz: http://tinyurl.com/zfl42xr
|
| Briefly: for some web sites, the font(s) look fuzzy.
|
| For the current problem site (quora.com), the fonts look A-OK under IE
| 11 and they look A-OK if I paste the page's contents into MS Word.
|

I don't visit obscured URLs, but quora.com looks
fine to me. In fact, I don't remember ever seeing
any text in Firefox or Pale Moon that looked non-
anti-aliased. Are you sure it's not Windows settings
connected to "smoothing of screen fonts"?

PeteCresswell wrote:

I posted something like this a bunch of months ago, but an answer never
emerged.

viz: http://tinyurl.com/zfl42xr

Briefly: for some web sites, the font(s) look fuzzy.

For the current problem site (quora.com), the fonts look A-OK under IE
11 and they look A-OK if I paste the page's contents into MS Word.

But under both Chrome and FireFox the fonts look quite ragged. Same
deal with a browser called "Iron".

Seems like all browsers should be working out of the same pool of fonts,
right?

Maybe it's time for me to stop trying to fool Mother Nature and just
revert to IE....

Can anybody shed some light?

Don't know what was suggested in your prior thread. You did not give
the Message-ID header to identify it. Nope, not going to spend more
work than you did to find it.

The home page (the URL you gave) looks fine to me. No jaggy fonting.
Obviously their home page does not look like their web page of which you
took a snapshot and uploaded. You didn't give your search criteria or
the URL for the web page that you did snapshot.

Are the jaggy web browsers configured to allow retrieving of web fonts
or not?

I block the download web fonts. You can find lots of online articles
about this being a privacy issue. As a result, I've had to complain to
sites that use them in place of their own icon image files (only a few
have changed). Web designers don't care and want to minimize bandwidth
on a site by having visitors retrieve fonts from elsewhere (that will
know your IP address and where you visited that had you retrieve the
web/icon fonts). The use of web fonts is so pervasive that I gave up
and allowed web fonts. Even my bank and pharmacy use them making
reading their web pages either difficult or impossible (because, like
hierglyphics that failed, they rely on images to imply meaning). It's
up to you if you want to enable retrieval of web fonts in your web
browsers. By default, I suspect all web browsers allow them, so perhaps
you installed an add-on that blocks them.

How many system fonts are installed in your OS? Fallback fonting relies
on you actually having the set of fallback fonts. I have 241 fonts in
my Windows 7 Home x64. I don't know how many come bundled in that
Windows edition. Some programs add more fonts. At one time back in
Windows XP, I had over 600 fonts primarily because I had fonts sets that
I installed over and above what the OS had and the apps installed. Most
never got used so I never bothered installing those font sets in Win7.

In the web page code, CSS can specify a font-family. It is a list of
fonts in preference order that the site wants for you to use when
viewing that page. In the past, Firefox was known not to honor that
directive. Instead they would only use the first font listed in the
"font-family:" attribute and then rely on their own fallback font list
if the first one was missing rather than try those the site listed as
alternatives. That was a problem noted back in 2010. Sometime in 2011,
someone opened a bug ticket complaining about the font fallback issue,
like:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=705594

There are probably lots of tickets on font problems in Firefox. This
one took 4 years before it got resolved. For some info on how font
fallback works in apps (which is NOT standardized), see:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2...-font-fallback

cmap lookup is the last used algorithm because it is computationally
expensive. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cmap_(font)
Not much there but it links to:
https://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/cmap.htm

Rendering depends on how you configured the app, what add-ons you
installed into the app, which app is used hence which fallback
algorithm, and what is in your OS.

Font fallback in Windows is handled by Microsoft's Uniscribe engine:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...(v=vs.85).aspx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniscribe

which got replaced with their DirectWrite engine as of Win7:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...(v=vs.85).aspx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectWrite

I've never gotten into delving into altering the default font fallback
scheme in Windows. It becomes overly esoteric gobblety-gook for me to
bother.

In Firefox, go to Options - Content and check what default font you
configured Firefox to use if it cannot find a suitable matching font
specified by the web page's code or a matching one in its own font
fallback schema. Mine is set to Times New Roman 16pt; however, the
quora.com web page doesn't use that when rendered in Firefox (I cannot
test the page you show in your snapshot since you did not give a URL to
it). If you click on the Advanced button, there are other choices for
substitute fonts for proportionally and non-porportionally spaced fonts
and for serif versus non-serif fonts along with what sizes to use.
There is also a legacy setting for pages that do not declare a font or a
list of them via font-family. My settings there are currently:

Fonts for: Latin
Proportional: Serif 16pt
Serif: Times New Roman
Non-serif: Arial
Monospace: Courier New 13pt
Minimum font size: None (might change this for sites with tiny fonts)
Allow pages to choose their own fonts: enabled (these are web fonts)
Text Encoding for Legacy Content: Fallback = Default for Current Locale

Since rendering looks good in some web browsers and not others, could be
the "bad" web browsers are not obeying the font-family attribute, or you
configured the web browser to block fonts, change its font fallback, or
using an add-on that interferes with font fallback or blocking retrieval
of web-based fonts.

Firefox supports Reader Mode (called Reader View in its variants or
other engines). This extracts the text content of the page stripping
out images, ads, and other blather. It can be quite handy to read just
the article and eliminate the dross and distractions.
Not all web sites support Reader Mode. quora.com does not for their
home page. That does not mandate they cannot use it for their other web
pages, like the one you snappshotted but never gave a URL. Chrome has
Reader Mode, too. Since not all web pages employ an alternative content
version for Reader Mode, there are add-ons that attempt to the same
cleanup. Algorithms are guessing schemes so sometimes the readability
view isn't so readable.

(PeteCresswell) wrote:
I posted something like this a bunch of months ago, but an answer never
emerged.

viz: http://tinyurl.com/zfl42xr

Briefly: for some web sites, the font(s) look fuzzy.

For the current problem site (quora.com), the fonts look A-OK under IE
11 and they look A-OK if I paste the page's contents into MS Word.

But under both Chrome and FireFox the fonts look quite ragged. Same
deal with a browser called "Iron".

Seems like all browsers should be working out of the same pool of fonts,
right?

Maybe it's time for me to stop trying to fool Mother Nature and just
revert to IE....

Can anybody shed some light?

The lower left sample has a bit of color, implying ClearType.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleartype

The upper left has proper font spacing. The upper right does not.

The web page itself consists of very few files, but the files look
to have sections that would normally be handled by a set of tiles.

The main HTML has CSS in it.

font-family: 'q_serif', Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif

The q_serif appears to be a web font hosted by the website itself.
The other choices might be platform fonts.

It's also possible a web browser will use google fonts (even for
what look like platform fonts), but I don't really know what
the decision tree looks like. CSS is one thing. The browser
behavior is another.

Since the files are "generated", there's really no guarantee two people
will get the same files.

The site is protected by a "No-Robots", so I cannot use
something like this on it.

http://browsershots.org/

Paul

On Sun, 19 Feb 2017 15:04:42 -0500, (PeteCresswell) wrote:

I posted something like this a bunch of months ago, but an answer never
emerged.

viz: http://tinyurl.com/zfl42xr

Briefly: for some web sites, the font(s) look fuzzy.

For the current problem site (quora.com), the fonts look A-OK under IE
11 and they look A-OK if I paste the page's contents into MS Word.

But under both Chrome and FireFox the fonts look quite ragged. Same
deal with a browser called "Iron".

Seems like all browsers should be working out of the same pool of fonts,
right?

Maybe it's time for me to stop trying to fool Mother Nature and just
revert to IE....

Can anybody shed some light?

I had fuzzy text in PM27 and Cyberfox. With a lot of help from Moonchild, I
got rid of the cause, so this might be of some help:
https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?t=13644
--
Peter.
The gods will stay away
whilst religions hold sway

Per David E. Ross:
They are Arial and
Georgia and appear quite sharp. Georgia in particular is known to be
sharp and easily read both on a computer monitor and printed on hard
copy. The images of text on that page are also sharp.

- How does one determine which font they are looking at?

- What browser are you using?
--
Pete Cresswell

Per Mayayana:
Are you sure it's not Windows settings
connected to "smoothing of screen fonts"?

99% sure - I flipped the setting back-and-forth, but no change.
--
Pete Cresswell

"(PeteCresswell)" wrote

| They are Arial and
| Georgia and appear quite sharp. Georgia in particular is known to be
| sharp and easily read both on a computer monitor and printed on hard
| copy. The images of text on that page are also sharp.
|
| - How does one determine which font they are looking at?
|

Do you have the Developer Tools? If so you can
right-click a spot and click Inspect Element. But
it gets complicated. The "tagline", "A place to share
knowledge...." is specified as being the web font
q_serif at one point in the CSS. I block web fonts
and for me it's Georgia. If I didn't have Georgia it
would be Times New Roman.
What I'm not sure of is whether I see it specced
as Georgia because I blocked q_serif, or whether
the web designer screwed up and specced Georgia
lower down in the CSS than they specced q_serif.

In any case, if you had some sort of corrupted
font it would probably show up in other places.
And if the q_serif web font were the problem it
wouldn't apply to all text. For instance, the disclaimer
text "By signing up...." is specced as helvetica, arial.

If you want to experiment with web fonts settings
you can try:

gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled = false
gfx.font_rendering.graphite.enabled = false

Both of those are security risks, anyway. But without
them you'll find that some icon fonts show up as little
boxes with hex numbers in them because you don't
have a local replacement for them.

On 2/20/2017 6:13 AM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per David E. Ross:
They are Arial and
Georgia and appear quite sharp. Georgia in particular is known to be
sharp and easily read both on a computer monitor and printed on hard
copy. The images of text on that page are also sharp.

- How does one determine which font they are looking at?

- What browser are you using?


My browser is SeaMonkey 2.46.

I installed an old version (0.1) of the Font Information extension;
newer versions do not work with SeaMonkey but do work with Firefox. All
I have to do is use my cursor to mark a section of text on a Web page,
right-click, and select "Show Fonts in Selection" from the pull-down
context menu. A small popup appears, identifying the fonts in the
selected text.

--
David E. Ross
http://www.rossde.com/

Paraphrasing Mark Twain, who was quoting someone else:
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and
alternative truths.

(PeteCresswell) wrote:
I posted something like this a bunch of months ago, but an answer never
emerged.

viz: http://tinyurl.com/zfl42xr

Briefly: for some web sites, the font(s) look fuzzy.

For the current problem site (quora.com), the fonts look A-OK under IE
11 and they look A-OK if I paste the page's contents into MS Word.

But under both Chrome and FireFox the fonts look quite ragged. Same
deal with a browser called "Iron".

Seems like all browsers should be working out of the same pool of fonts,
right?

Maybe it's time for me to stop trying to fool Mother Nature and just
revert to IE....

Can anybody shed some light?

Here's an article on font rendering.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/201...ont-rendering/

Paul