Description of problem: Fonts in GNOME Web (Epiphany) are displayed badly (with no apparent antialiasing). It is especially visible if compared to Mozilla Firefox. Trying to enforce a larger font size doesn't appear to work. freetype-freeworld has been installed from the RPM Fusion repository, and RGBA subpixel antialiasing with slight hinting has been activated. On Firefox, minimum font size has been set to 12. http://s30.postimg.org/60agx2wzl/Screenshot_from_2015_02_12_16_08_09.png http://s18.postimg.org/lm1j36jbd/Screenshot_from_2015_02_12_16_08_17.png http://s21.postimg.org/q42b4o72f/Screenshot_from_2015_02_12_16_34_39.png http://s1.postimg.org/wg9wch6pb/Screenshot_from_2015_02_12_16_34_48.png http://s15.postimg.org/wi5i3jf6j/Screenshot_from_2015_02_12_16_36_22.png Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 1:3.14.2-3.fc21 How reproducible: Always reproducible. Behaviour consistent across all tested websites (reddit.com, repubblica.it, fedoraforum.org, guardian.co.uk).
Posted screenshots have been reduced in quality. Here are some good-quality screenshots: http://i5.minus.com/ik4WeK0bFEMaM.png http://i4.minus.com/ifmhriayFbE0U.png http://i4.minus.com/iHmf25vdpcU4U.png http://i1.minus.com/ibaTeqmInxf5sB.png http://i1.minus.com/ibaX1L9GJzCopB.png
I think they're being antialiased. They would look REALLY bad if they weren't. Anyway it's really hard to deal with font bugs unless you're an expert, and we don't have any. Both Firefox and WebKitGTK+ use fontconfig, but Firefox use skia to create the fonts whereas we use cairo. The difference could be in those libraries, or in how we use fontconfig. E.g. we "seed" fontconfig with the GTK+ font settings you can set in Tweak Tool; maybe Firefox doesn't. I've spent a good amount of time looking through our font configuration code (if you care, it is under WebKit/Source/WebCore/platform/graphics/freetype) and I don't see any issue with system fonts. We're letting GTK+ dictate font settings for web fonts without checking fontconfig at all, which is a problem, but those are system fonts in your screenshots. The code is not straightforward, so it's possible we're doing something wrong and I just haven't noticed. Note: font display is really subjective. The fonts you have in Firefox, you might call "smooth," but I call "blurry." :) My concern is if we're somehow not handling fontconfig properly, rather than that you don't like Fedora's defaults.
Thanks again for reporting this bug. (In reply to Adriano Petrosillo from comment #1) > Posted screenshots have been reduced in quality. Here are some good-quality > screenshots: > > http://i5.minus.com/ik4WeK0bFEMaM.png > http://i4.minus.com/ifmhriayFbE0U.png Turns out these are simply not the same font. Firefox is using Liberation Sans and WebKit is using DejaVu Sans, at least with our default configuration. (See [1] or [2] for background on why; WebKit trunk now uses Liberation Sans as well.) > http://i4.minus.com/iHmf25vdpcU4U.png > http://i1.minus.com/ibaTeqmInxf5sB.png > http://i1.minus.com/ibaX1L9GJzCopB.png Ditto (Firefox again picked Liberation Sans, WebKit again picked DejaVu Sans). Now, it's possible there are additional behavior differences asides from the selection of different fonts. If so, [3] applies. [1] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=147057 [2] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752533 [3] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752533#c5