The default preferences for fonts need a major revision. While the defaults for Western encodings are way too big and with a perhaps unoptimal font choice (I would go for Lucida Grande at 13px, the system default, rather than Times at overbig 16px, making sans-serif the default), things are pretty much worse for other encodings. Simplified Chinese currently comes with defaults of 15px (why use px?), and with a mix of poor font choices (Song, Hei, the _bitmap_ font Beijing). All of these display pretty poor at 15 (Beijing always displays poor), and it doesn't get much better at 16. Not only are they unantialiased (probably wrong threshold in Mozilla), the glyphs also squeeze into each other. Just load a Google search page to see this in action. Mac OS X comes with the dfonts Song, Fangsong, Kai (serif), Hei (sans-serif) and Beijing (bitmap). All of these (except Beijing) display fine at 18px or larger. Mac OS X also comes with equivalent TrueType fonts that render much better: STSong, STFangsong, STKaiti (serif) and STHeiti (sans-serif). These display well at 16px, although that would be considered the absolute minimal size (it corresponds to 12 px for the Western glyphs). I would suggest the following default set of preferences for Simplified Chinese: Default: serif Sans-serif: STHeiti (华文细黑) 18px Serif: STKaiti (华文楷体) 18px Cursive, Fantasy: STFangsong (华文仿宋) 18px Monospace: same as sans-serif. This would reflect a true Mac OS X experience with wholly antialiased type for those who install the Asian Font extras. For those who don't, well... just go with whatever exists, but make it 18px. For Western, I suggest the following: Default: sans-serif Serif: Times 13px (unfortunately there are no other good serif fonts shipped with Mac OS X; Times is a horrible typeface) Sans-serif: Lucida Grande 13px (default system font, very legible) Cursive, Fantasy: whatever Monospace: Courier (not New Courier) 12px 13px is already considered way too big by many, so it would be a good standard choice. Why Mozilla feel the urge to set 16px as default is way beyond me, especially when Chinese fonts are set at 15px. There is no coherence at all in this. Similar thoughts apply to other encodings, many of which aren't even enabled currently. This is a good starting point.

Stripped from styles and font tags. This could be used to see some various font settings in a ction on a realworld example.

This is what will be seen on a virgin Mozilla after download. Antialiased, jaggy, ugly text reminiscent of the Wintel/Lunix PC experience... we don't want that on Mac OS X, thank you very much.

Here, with STKaiti 18px set as default font, it looks as it should on a Mac. Antialiased and beautifully rendered text all the way. Any ST font would do (these have Chinese glyphs in the font file names on Mac OS X). It could be set at 15px or 16px as well, but then the discrepancy between Chinese and Western sizes comes in play. The default size for Western should reflect the default size in other encodings as well (and vice versa). Somewhat bigger default to counterstrike against the <font size="-1"> sites is desirable. (Default should really be to turn minimum fontsize on at 15px or so).

intl

mac default font selection issue. over to ftang and cc nhotta

reassign to nhotta

Any thoughts? This kind of bug shouldn't take too much time to resolve. Lemme give you some numbers, in addition to the self-evident aestethics shown in the attachments: Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar comes with a set of very elegant GB18030 fonts for Simplifed Chinese, each containing 30946 glyphs, including the full sets of 20902 glyphs in CJK Unified Ideographs and 6582 glyphs in CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A. These are STKaiti, STFangsong, STSong and STHeiti. They are installed by default. The Mac OS Classic Language Pack equivalents (Kai, Hei, Song, Fang Song), also used in Mac OS X 10.0-10.1.5, have only 7591 glyphs in total, of which 6763 are CJK Unified Ideographs. The current Mozilla default font for Simplifed Chinese, Beijing, is a _bitmap_ font containing 6763 glyphs in CJK Unified Ideographs. Why on earth is this? For Western encodings we have Lucida Grande with 1753 glyphs (including Greek, Arabic, Cyrillic and Latin Extended A and B), although Helvetica with its measly 384 glyphs is set as default. The list can go on, but it is most pathetic concerning Simplified Chinese. Most users never change these settings, and I think it is paramount that Mozilla displays as good as it can to win the hearts of the crowd.

*** Bug 159557 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I would suggest that the summary be changed to that of my bug "Change default OS X font set to anti-aliasing friendly fonts" however this might not be a good idea seeing no one noticed it...

There's currently work underway on addressing Mac OS X default fonts in bug 159809 (per Pinkerton/Josh, kept as a Camino bug so it doesn't languish or get lost). *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 159809 ***