GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 598645
Fonts are too small compared to application font, rendering pages such as live.gnome.org incorrectly
Last modified: 2011-03-16 16:04:30 UTC
Created attachment 145573 [details] live.gnome.org front page using Epiphany and Firefox. live.gnome.org provides a form on top of the webpage. It has a text entry and a couple of buttons. The buttons does not look like any widget on the current theme (Clearlooks). Also, the widgets are not properly aligned. Attached you will find how the webpage is rendered using Epiphany 2.28.0 (WebkitGtk 1.1.15.2) and Firefox.
That's interesting. I can reproduce this, and it's just Epiphany that has this problem. Even Midori and Chromium render the search box right.
It turns out that this is a side effect of the minimum font size pref in Epiphany which can break the layout in some circumstances. I guess this is NOTABUG then??
If I set the minimun size at 8, it renders the widgets fine. However, some parts of the webpages are not very legible at all. In fact, I do not know what should I set to have a similar render than Gecko, for instance. If Firefox I have: Default font: serif size: 16 Minimum font size: None. However, Firefox works fine and, iirc, I have never had to change the font size in the preference settings. With Epiphany I had to set the minimum font size to have an usable browser. I have set a minimum of 10pt to have a similar font size than Firefox. The minimum font size I have to set in Epiphany is 8 to have a "good" render live.gnome.org. However, bugzilla shows me very tiny fonts, as well as the menu at live.gnome.org. IMVHO, the render should be both nice and readable. And it should just works.
On the other hand, If I set a higher default font size in Firefox (18, 20, ...28), still the textbox is rendered fine. With ugly big fonts, but it is near what I would expect.
After playing a bit with fonts at Firefox and Epiphant/Webkit, I got the impression that Epiphany sets the default font size = minimum font size, hence, some texts looks normal but other looks very tiny in the same page. However, Gecko does not set the default one = minimum one. I still wonder, why the font sizes in web browsers do not seem to fit with the font size defined for the desktop. For instance, I have to set Firefox default font size = 14, to get the same font size I have for my applications (9). However, if I set 9 as the minimum font size for Epiphany, it does not render properly live.gnome.org, but the font size match with applications.
(In reply to comment #5) > After playing a bit with fonts at Firefox and Epiphant/Webkit, I got the > impression > that Epiphany sets the default font size = minimum font size, hence, some texts > looks > normal but other looks very tiny in the same page. bugs.webkit.org behaves particularly badly with my font settings (default font "Sans 8", font dpi set to 145, Epiphany set to minimum size 9). At default zoom (Ctrl+0), the front page has tiny tiny text, but most of the text on search and bug pages is normal. If I zoom in to make the front page look right, then some of the text on the search/bug pages stays normal, but some of it gets zoomed too large.
*** Bug 625455 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
A key point from dupe 625455: > 2 Matt Read 2010-09-02 00:53:10 UTC > The application font is not (usually) a reasonable size for the content of a > web page. In order to get around epiphany using the application font size I use > the following script when launching epiphany to set it back sane defaults: > > gconftool-2 --set "/desktop/gnome/interface/font_name" --type string "DejaVu > Sans 11" > epiphany-browser& > sleep 4 > gconftool-2 --set "/desktop/gnome/interface/font_name" --type string "DejaVu > Sans 10" ... > So i think the real issue is that the application font, which is used in GUI elements, is not appropriate for a default webpage font. Your idea of using the document font would make more sense than the application font, a lot more.
From blocked bug 644523: "2. The reason we expose "Use system fonts" as an option is that often the Gnome font sizes are set too small for web content." I can't help but think that this is referring to the "Application" font and not the "Document" font, which, because it's to be used for long documents like web pages, should be an appropriate size anyways. Further, it seems like the issue isn't about fonts at all, but only about size. Should there be an option that says: "[*] Use system document font size" Which, when unchecked, allows the user to specify the font size they'd prefer? That's the route the other big browsers take. At the same time, I thought that the "Document font (+size)" in gnome's settings was intended to solve exactly this problem.
644521 uses the document font instead of the application font, which means that the user can select the web font size separately, which resolves this issue, so I'm marking this as a dupe of that. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 644523 ***
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 644521 ***