[oi-dev] Fwd: Re: [desktop-discuss] Poor text antialiasing behaviour in Firefox

[Alan Coopersmith]

BTW, OI may want to look into providing the Microsoft Web Fonts somehow, but
you'd have to be careful putting them into your main pkg repo directly as the
license terms do not allow redistributing for profit.   I remember some Linux
distros coming up with a variety of solutions for packaging them without
preventing others from embedding their distros in for-profit products or
selling CD's of them, etc.

The download site I know of for them is:
	http://www.freedesktop.org/software/fontconfig/webfonts/
since Microsoft's original download site was taken down years ago, but the
license allowed others to redistribute in perpetuity.

	-alan-

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [desktop-discuss] Poor text antialiasing behaviour in Firefox
Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2010 08:36:06 -0800
From: Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith at oracle.com>
To: Dave Koelmeyer <davekoelmeyer at me.com>
CC: desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org

On 12/19/10 05:09 AM, Dave Koelmeyer wrote:
> Hi, 
> 
> This has always bugged me for as long as I can remember, and I wonder if anyone knows why. 
> 
> Firefox 3.6.8 in Ubuntu:
> 
> http://www.davekoelmeyer.co.nz/docs/Ubuntu1004Firefox368.png
> 
> All headings and text are antialised, and page appears fine. 
> 
> Now, compare with the same page in Firefox 3.6.12 on OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana:
> 
> http://www.davekoelmeyer.co.nz/docs/oi_147Firefox3612.png
> 
> Most text elements by comparison are pretty jagged, but the headings are particularly ugly. 

Comes through antialiased for me on Solaris 11 Express when I go to the
original site at
http://blog.datazuul.com/roller/entry/new_apache_roller_theme_lightword

Looking in their CSS for the headline it has:
	 font-family: Vera,Helvetica,Georgia;

I'm not sure if "Vera" matches our Bitstream Vera font, but if it falls back
to Helvetica, the results will really depend on which fonts you have installed.
The default fonts from X.Org include bitmapped versions of Helvetica, which
don't scale well or get antialiased.   If you install the
system/font/truetype/fonts-core you'll get nice TrueType versions of the
"Microsoft Web Fonts" and
other common fonts which will give you a much better looking font, but for
opensolaris, that's in the "extra" repo, not the main repo, since it's
commercially licensed and not redistributable.   (In Solaris 11 Express, since
there was no longer a goal of making the main package repository or LiveCDs be
freely redistributable, those fonts have moved into both the main repo and the
default LiveCD install set.   Thus, I have the good fonts installed when I look,
which may explain the differing results.)

For more info, see:
	https://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=4605
	http://blogs.sun.com/observatory/entry/truetype_fonts