Bug 106023

Hmm, so you have a font problem right ? I know somebody who knows much 
more about fonts than me :-) 

Mark Rechler> Fonts get cut off because of this I believe

Are they really "cut off" or are they just too small or too big.

Created attachment 47012 [details]
Screenshot of the font problem

This is a screenshot of the font problem. The second paragraph shows the
problem.

Just wondering if anybody has been able to figure out the cause of the problem.
Thanks.

Thank you for the screen shot.

I doubt it has anything to do with the missing entry for the ViewSonic
VX800 monitor in SaX2.

The size of the fonts also looks reasonable.

Just to make sure that it doesn't have anything to do with the missing
entry for the ViewSonic VX800 monitor in SaX2, please check the following:

Is there an entry "DisplaySize" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf? For example like this:

    Section "Monitor"
      DisplaySize  360 270
      HorizSync    27-110
      Identifier   "Monitor[0]"
      ModelName    "VISION MASTER PRO 450"
      Option       "DPMS"
      VendorName   "IIYAMA"
      VertRefresh  50-150
      UseModes     "Modes[0]"
    EndSection

The two values behind DisplaySize are the horizontal and vertical
dimensions of your monitor screen in millimeter.

Please measure your monitor and check whether these values are
correct.  If there is no entry for DisplaySize at all, please add one
to the "Monitor" section with the correct dimensions?

Does this make any difference?

I guess not, but we should make sure first that this is not the problem.

I have checked the DisplaySize values and they are accurate. The problem is still occurring. Thank you.

This is what my xorg.conf has:

Section "Monitor"
  Option       "CalcAlgorithm" "CheckDesktopGeometry"
  DisplaySize  357 286
  HorizSync    30-83
  Identifier   "Monitor[0]"
  ModelName    "1280X1024@60HZ"
  Option       "DPMS"
  VendorName   "--> LCD"
  VertRefresh  50-75
  UseModes     "Modes[0]"
EndSection

According to

http://www.viewsonic.com/support/desktopdisplays/lcddisplays/xseries/vx800/#specs

the DisplaySize is correct indeed.

Then I'm sure that your problem has nothing to do with the missing
entry for the "VX800" monitor in SaX2. The values appear to be
accurate it could not get any better if there was an entry in SaX2.

Most modern monitors report their DisplaySize and other features
automatically, looks like this has happened here (unless you did set
DisplaySize manually).

Anyway, the setup seems to be correct, therefore this cannot be the
problem.

I still have no idea whatsoever what the problem could be.

Your screen shot is in JPEG format.

Please never make screen shots to illustrate a bug in JPEG format.
JPEG format is suitable for photographic images but not for screen
shots to reproduce a bug. JPEG uses a high compression algorithm which
does not reproduce faithfully every pixel. JPEG files are small, but
on you screen shot one cannot easily distinguish artifacts created by
the JPEG compression from other effects. For example the gray around
you glyphs is probably partly from anti-aliasing and partly form JPEG
artifacts.

Please use PNG format for screen shots in order to reproduce all
pixels exactly as they were on your screen.

Can you attach the screen shot in PNG again?

More questions:

What program is shown in the screen shot?
Your screen shot looks like as if it has been edited. Or how
did you create the round corners? The window frame is missing,
therefore I cannot see which program was used.
I guess it was Mozilla or Firefox and this is a web-page, right?

This could be a problem in Firefox then.

Created attachment 48636 [details]
PNG Screenshot

This is a PNG screenshot. The program is Firefox. The previous screenshot was
cropped and blown up to make the problem more apparent. To see it here, zoom in
on the second paragraph. I am unable to produce the problem in Opera oddly
enough. It very well might be Firefox, but that would be odd as I do not have
that issue in Fedora Core or Ubuntu. The same exact problem is present in Mepis
however. Office is also affected in Mepis (not in SuSE so far), which makes me
wonder if this is a GTK bug? Thanks.

I am not sure if this helps, but the fonts are also corrected if the window
loses focus. Thanks.

I have fixed the bug/problem. In gnome-control-center I changed the font option
to sub-piexl(LCD) and all is well now. Thanks for all your help.

I doubt that the problem has something to do with sub-pixel hinting.

Even if, it is strange that switching on sub-pixel hinting in the
gnome-control-center works at all for you because of bug #104365.  Are
you sure that sub-pixel hinting is now on on your machine?  You can
check with "xmag" whether you really see coloured rendering.

To me this still looks like a Mozilla/Firefox bug. There are several
similar bugreports with weird rendering in Mozilla/Firefox, very
similar to your report. It is still unknown what causes this though
and it does not happen for most users. Looks like this bug is only
triggered in rather rare conditions.

There is no coloured rendering. Maybe when I opened font prefrences and selected
subpixel smoothing as rendering (seperate from hinting?) it fixed the problem.
Or maybe some initial bad font settings were overridden? Are there any actual
font config files that might help in determining what this is? Thanks.

The bug has actually appeared again. It is not as bad as it was before though. I
guess it is Firefox though. These problems do not happen in any other browsers.
Thanks.

Mark> Are there any actual font config files that might help in
determining Mark> what this is?

The system wide setup files for fontconfig are in /etc/fonts/.

You may add your own fontconfig setup file ~/.fonts.conf to override
system wide settings.

When you use the KDE control centre to setup anti-aliasing,
sub-pixel-rendering, etc. ... the results are written to ~/.fonts.conf
and will be effective for both KDE *and* GNOME (there are a few bugs
though in the way KDE writes ~/.fonts.conf, see bug #113637).

However, when you use the Gnome control centre to do this sort of
setup, Gnome doesn't write anything to ~/.fonts.conf, it sets some
X-resources instead. This will can never have an effect on KDE if you
later start KDE on the same machine as the X-resources are not
permanent, they are set only when Gnome starts (Gnome remembers the
previous values in ~/.gconf/ instead of writing ~/.fonts.conf).  And,
even worse, the X-resources set by Gnome have currently no effect! 
(For details why not see bug #104365).

That means if you want to enable sub-pixel rendering (which is
coloured rendering), you either have to use the KDE control centre
(call "kcontrol" from the command line) or do it manually by writing
your ~/.fonts.conf manually.

Just as an example, if you want to enable sub-pixel rendering with the
order "rgb" (red, green, blue from left to right), always use the
autohinter and always use anti-aliasing, you can write the following
in your ~/.fonts.conf:


    <fontconfig>

	    <match target="font">
		    <edit name="rgba" mode="assign">
			    <const>rgb</const>
		    </edit>
	    </match>
	    <match target="font">
		    <edit name="autohinter">
			    <bool>true</bool>
		    </edit>
	    </match>
	    <match target="font">
		    <edit name="antialias">
			    <bool>true</bool>
		    </edit>
	    </match>

    </fontconfig>

(The opening <fontconfig> and the closing </fontconfig> tags are
needed at the beginning and end of each fontconfig setup file).

All this will not help for you Mozilla/Firefox problem, which is most
likely a bug of Mozilla/Firefox.

I only explained this to help you understand the fontconfig setup
better.

Even though the missing entry for your Viewsonic VX800 Monitor doesn't
have anything to do with the font rendering problem in Mozilla, the
SaX2 author Marcus Schäfer said he would like to add this monitor to
the list just for completeness.

Can you please add the output of

    hwinfo --monitor

to this bug report? Marcus will then add an entry for your monitor for
the next release.

The command yields this output:

33: None 00.0: 10000 Monitor
  [Created at fb.70]
  Unique ID: rdCR.EY_qmtb9YY0
  Hardware Class: monitor
  Model: "Generic Monitor"
  Vendor: "Generic"
  Device: "Monitor"
  Resolution: 1280x1024@77Hz
  Driver Info #0:
    Max. Resolution: 1280x1024
    Vert. Sync Range: 50-90 Hz
    Hor. Sync Range: 31-82 kHz
  Config Status: cfg=yes, avail=yes, need=yes, active=unknown

Howeverm the info is incorrect. Horizontal should be 30-83. Vertical 50-75.
Resolution should be 1280x1024@60Hz. Thanks.

Adding Marcus Schäfer <ms@suse.de> to CC:.

Ok, I added the monitor to the database: 
 
+#============================================== 
+# VX 800 
+#---------------------------------------------- 
+VIEWSONIC:VX 800  { 
+ Option=DPMS 
+ Hsync=30-83 
+ Vsync=50-75 
+} 
 

Changing subject because it is a Firefox problem.

I have no idea what has caused the problem (although I have seen similar problems in Firefox
myself a few times).

But I never saw such problems again during the last few months, therefore I guess it is fixed
in newer versions of firefox. Closing as FIXED for now.

Please retest with MozillaFirefox-1.5.0.1 (the version which will be distributed with SuSE Linux 10.1)
and reopen this bug if the problem persists.