Bug 1160935

It seems that Chrome on my system skips the Helvetica replacements and uses Arial instead (which I have installed); if Arial is not installed, it somehow chooses Liberation Sans.

In my system there is a symlink 30-metric-aliases.conf in /etc/fonts/conf.d to /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/30-metric-aliases.conf. Removing this symlink causes 

$ fc-match Helvetica
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"

instead of Nimbus Sans.

I'm not a fontconfig guru but that may be something to check for your modification to take effect.

Ah, I didn't fully read your comment. Shame on me.

That's more about fontconfig setup, right?

Well, it's about the interaction of firefox and the fontconfig setup on a standard Fedora system; it could be addressed in either place.  I think the choice of Nimbus Sans was based on metric compatibility, which is less important for web fonts.

The explanantion of the Chrome behavior seems to be, "Because web pages themselves (via CSS) provide their own font fallback preferences, Chrome disregards the font fallback provided by fontconfig except when the fonts requested by the page don't provide the characters needed." (http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/fonts/)

Hmm, that's why I don't like maintaining the centralized font aliases in fontconfig and why we set it up in each fonts packages.
The sort of this issue may depends on what the reporter really want. it could be a font bug which should be fixed in a font, in this case, urw-fonts. or it could be a preference issue which can be fixed in installing/uninstalling the unnecessary font packages with the separate config files. making the order of the fonts to satisfy all of users' requirements is quite difficult. the default config in fontconfig is just adding fonts as a last resort. it's not enforcing anything. if we have a good candidate for those fonts as a package, it should do that there. otherwise it will just be used. nobody writes a config as a Helvetica alternative in their own config in this case. that's it.

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This is still a problem with an up-to-date Fedora 21.

I'm also changing the component back to Firefox, because I don't think it's clear that the fontconfig default is wrong for the majority of uses, it just happens to be wrong for Firefox.  So Firefox should override it, either with a local fontconfig file (which should be pretty trivial) or by adopting the Chrome behavior.

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(In reply to Jason Merrill from comment #5)
> Well, it's about the interaction of firefox and the fontconfig setup on a
> standard Fedora system; it could be addressed in either place.  I think the
> choice of Nimbus Sans was based on metric compatibility, which is less
> important for web fonts.

Nimbus is a valid (if old) Helvetica substitute it was designed to replace Helvetica.

If you want better substitutes for historical postscript fonts such as Helvetica, you should package TEX Gyre in Fedora (assuming spot confirms it passes legal now). TEX Gyre is the most modern floss postscript font replacement set.

Thanks, but I'm not trying to find a better Helvetica substitute, what I want is for Facebook to look better in Firefox.  I think the Chrome behavior quoted in comment #5, i.e. skipping Helvetica in the web font list rather than looking for a substitute, makes a lot of sense.

(In reply to Jason Merrill from comment #11)
> Thanks, but I'm not trying to find a better Helvetica substitute, what I
> want is for Facebook to look better in Firefox.  I think the Chrome behavior
> quoted in comment #5, i.e. skipping Helvetica in the web font list rather
> than looking for a substitute, makes a lot of sense.

That may work for some pages but given how some web designers inist on pixel-perfect designs Helvetica really needs to be substituted by something with the same metrics

Is this bug still exist in F23? Is not please close else move to F23.

Still an issue for F23.

(In reply to Nicolas Mailhot from comment #12)
> (In reply to Jason Merrill from comment #11)
> > Thanks, but I'm not trying to find a better Helvetica substitute, what I
> > want is for Facebook to look better in Firefox.  I think the Chrome behavior
> > quoted in comment #5, i.e. skipping Helvetica in the web font list rather
> > than looking for a substitute, makes a lot of sense.
> 
> That may work for some pages but given how some web designers inist on
> pixel-perfect designs Helvetica really needs to be substituted by something
> with the same metrics

For pages that only request Helvetica, sure.  In this case, the page requests "helvetica, arial, sans-serif", so the web designer clearly isn't expecting pixel-exact layout.

To make more clearer, what's the expected behavior like what you said "good kerning"? as I said, this is a font issue or depends on what fonts you installed. if you have any particular fonts you want to use in that case, that would be a first step to get a solution for you.

Arimo and Liberation Sans look much better than Nimbus because they don't have letters stuck together.

(In reply to Jason Merrill from comment #15)

> For pages that only request Helvetica, sure.  In this case, the page
> requests "helvetica, arial, sans-serif", so the web designer clearly isn't
> expecting pixel-exact layout.

If only…

But anyway the browser knows the css stack, so it can do "if on linux, ignore helvetica if the designer suggested something else", but the font stack does not.

And still a good helvetica variant in Fedora would solve all scenarii, not just one.

Historically Liberation was also substitute for "Sans (a substitute for Arial, Albany, Helvetica, Nimbus Sans L, and Bitstream Vera Sans)". https://fedorahosted.org/liberation-fonts/

I don't know why we stopped doing that or may be we missed doing it from beginning.

For now i think lets go ahead by adding Liberation as an alias for Helvetica and see how it goes.

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I saw this occur on Fedora 25, with Firefox 52. Nimbus Sans L is configured as fallback for Helvetica, but the font appears to have bad kerning and this shows on certain websites, as originally reported.

It is my understanding, however, that the underlying issue is one of browser policy: as noted, Chrome follows CSS fallbacks over those defined in fontconfig, while Firefox, in Linux, respects the latter.¹ As such, it is probably more adequate to discuss the issue upstream.

¹See this related issue on Mozilla’s Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=553580