GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 764030
Very bad font spacing/kerning in hidpi
Last modified: 2016-03-22 22:50:56 UTC
Created attachment 324541 [details] Example of badly rendered text In hidpi mode Web's text layout is terrible, with characters being spaced incorrectly. It isn't a minor cosmetic issue, it's severe enough to make text harder to read. In the attached example you can see the main problem is that 'm' is consistently positioned too far to the right and/or has insufficient space after it, but that isn't all. I'm not sure whether the bug is in epiphany or webkit-gtk. The last font bug I experienced was in webkit, so I reported this one there first. But DevHelp seems OK, so it could be an epiphany bug this time.
In the webkit bug I've just linked there's an older screenshot showing a wider range of characters being affected.
OK, thanks for the link to the WebKit bug. Hmm... you say devhelp seems OK? Which version of devhelp, and which version of WebKitGTK+? I think devhelp and Epiphany should have the same problem.
I currently have DevHelp 3.18.1 and webkit-gtk 2.10.8, but I first noticed this problem several months ago; webkit-gtk was at 2.10.0 when I reported it to them. It looks like the pages at developer.gnome.org that are equivalent to those mostly used by DevHelp aren't affected by this bug when viewed in epiphany/Web. But many sites are, including DuckDuckGo and Google. So I'd guess it probably has something to do with the font styles in CSS?
Maybe you could try to reproduce this even if you don't have a true hidpi display? You can use gnome-tweak-tool to override the scaling, and I think a 1080p screen should just about have enough space for a usable desktop at a setting of 2x.
(In reply to Tony Houghton from comment #3) > It looks like the pages at developer.gnome.org that are equivalent to those > mostly used by DevHelp aren't affected by this bug when viewed in > epiphany/Web. But many sites are, including DuckDuckGo and Google. So I'd > guess it probably has something to do with the font styles in CSS? OK, that would explain it then. Closing this as NOTGNOME; we'll track it in the WebKit bug. (In reply to Tony Houghton from comment #4) > Maybe you could try to reproduce this even if you don't have a true hidpi > display? You can use gnome-tweak-tool to override the scaling, and I think a > 1080p screen should just about have enough space for a usable desktop at a > setting of 2x. Yeah, I see it's pretty bad. Our kerning is pretty bad even without hidpi mode, but this makes it a lot worse. I'm not sure if it's a separate hidpi bug, or just that hidpi makes our bad kerning move obvious. Unfortunately this is one of those issues that will likely be tricky to fix, as we don't have any font experts, but maybe I can find someone to look at it.