Bug 708921

Summary: Chinese small font in Fedora 15's Firefox not as good as that of Ubuntu's
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Yao Ziyuan <yaoziyuan>
Component: wqy-microhei-fontsAssignee: Peng Wu <pwu>
Status: CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: high Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 17CC: jni, petersen, pwu, shawn.p.huang
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2012-06-08 10:00:45 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Attachments:
Description Flags
Fedora 15's Firefox visiting www.sina.com.cn
none
Ubuntu 11.04's Firefox visiting www.sina.com.cn
none
Fedora 15's Firefox visiting www.sina.com.cn with zoom in twice
none
Ubuntu 11.04's Firefox visiting www.sina.com.cn with zoom in twice
none
Defaul Chinese small font in Fedora 14
none
Fedora 15 microhei none

Description Yao Ziyuan 2011-05-30 07:07:05 UTC
Description of problem:

The following screenshots let Fedora 15 and Ubuntu 11.04 visit the same Chinese web portal in Firefox:

Fedora 15:
http://img853.imageshack.us/img853/9764/fedora15.png

Ubuntu 11.04:
http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/7025/ubuntu1104k.png

As you can see, Ubuntu's chinese display is sharp and clear, like written with a pen; Fedora's is fuzzy and blurry, like written with a fuzzy brush. Ubuntu's has much better readability.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:

Let Fedora 15 and Ubuntu 11.04 browse http://www.sina.com.cn in Firefox.

Comment 1 Yao Ziyuan 2011-05-30 07:09:58 UTC
Created attachment 501722 [details]
Fedora 15's Firefox visiting www.sina.com.cn

Comment 2 Yao Ziyuan 2011-05-30 07:10:53 UTC
Created attachment 501723 [details]
Ubuntu 11.04's Firefox visiting www.sina.com.cn

Comment 3 Peng Wu 2011-05-30 07:37:49 UTC
Please provide the result of the following command:
$ rpm -qa "wqy-*-fonts"

Comment 4 Yao Ziyuan 2011-05-30 07:54:58 UTC
wqy-bitmap-fonts-1.0.0-0.2.rc1.fc15.noarch
wqy-unibit-fonts-1.1.0-8.fc15.noarch
wqy-zenhei-fonts-0.9.46-2.fc15.noarch

I manually installed wqy-bitmap-fonts. But before and after installing it, the result is the same.

A friend suspects the bug is related to GNOME 3's new font rendering engine. He says Fedora 14 used to be as good as Ubuntu in this aspect.

Another friend suspects that Ubuntu uses some non-free font or font anti-aliasing technology.

Comment 5 Peng Wu 2011-05-30 09:05:06 UTC
Please remove wqy-bitmap-fonts and wqy-unibit-fonts from your system, and run the following command as root user:
# zenheiset bitmap
I think the above command will enable bitmap font in wqy-zenhei-fonts, and fixes this bug.

Comment 6 Yao Ziyuan 2011-05-30 09:13:12 UTC
Yes, it fixed it. Please make it the default.

Comment 7 Yao Ziyuan 2011-05-30 09:36:48 UTC
Created attachment 501753 [details]
Fedora 15's Firefox visiting www.sina.com.cn with zoom in twice

Comment 8 Yao Ziyuan 2011-05-30 09:37:09 UTC
Created attachment 501754 [details]
Ubuntu 11.04's Firefox visiting www.sina.com.cn with zoom in twice

Comment 9 Yao Ziyuan 2011-05-30 09:38:59 UTC
But Ubuntu is still better:

If I zoom in in Ubuntu's Firefox (press <Ctrl> + <+> twice), its Chinese font
remains the same and the result is very clear:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=501754

If I zoom in in Fedora's Firefox (press <Ctrl> + <+> twice), the bitmap font
will switch to truetype ZenHei, and the result is not as clear as Ubuntu's:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=501753

Comment 10 Yao Ziyuan 2011-05-30 09:47:13 UTC
In Fedora's result, some strokes are much lighter than other strokes, making the characters look "watered down".

Comment 11 Peng Wu 2011-05-30 10:15:36 UTC
I think Ubuntu is using wqy-microhei-fonts, we make wqy-zenhei-fonts as the default font for Simplified Chinese, as it contains more glyphs than wqy-microhei-fonts.
And we need discussions to fit most user preferences, we will consider it later.

Comment 12 Yao Ziyuan 2011-05-30 10:51:38 UTC
In my personal opinion, readability is more important than glyph availability. What about making microhei the default font and zenhei a backup font in case a rare character is not covered by microhei?

Comment 13 Yao Ziyuan 2011-06-03 22:22:25 UTC
Created attachment 502922 [details]
Defaul Chinese small font in Fedora 14

Comment 14 Yao Ziyuan 2011-06-03 22:27:52 UTC
It is observed that Fedora 14 provides a clearer (sharper) default Chinese font (ZenHei) for small font sizes in Firefox. Compare:

F14:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=502922

F15:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=501722

Still, microhei as seen in Ubuntu 11.04 is the best among all.

Comment 15 Yao Ziyuan 2011-06-05 23:03:12 UTC
Created attachment 503132 [details]
Fedora 15 microhei

Comment 16 Yao Ziyuan 2011-06-05 23:05:27 UTC
It seems, Fedora 15 and Ubuntu 11.04 draw microhei differently (Ubuntu doing more clearly):

F15 drawing microhei:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=503132

Ubuntu 11.04 drawing microhei:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=501723

Comment 17 Peng Wu 2011-12-16 06:04:44 UTC
Please install both wqy-microhei-fonts and wqy-zenhei-fonts on Fedora.
And put the following file as ~/.fonts.conf in your home directory:
http://pwu.fedorapeople.org/fonttools/fonts.conf.example

We will try to provide a tool to customize your fonts in the future.

Comment 18 Peng Wu 2012-06-08 10:00:45 UTC
Please use fonts-tweak-tool to customize the fonts by yourself.