From: TenThumbs <tenthumbs@cybernex.net> Even though I have a TImes New Roman TrueType font available, Mozilla never uses it. In fact, Mozilla does a XListFonts on this font, which succeeds, but then ignore it.The same goes for Courier New. Looking at mozilla/gfx/src/gtk/nsFontMetricsGTK.cpp I see in nsFontMetricsGTK::FindFont that there is code to map these fonts to their supposed Unix equivalents. I realize that there is a naming issue with Times, Times Roman, TimesRoman, Times New Roman, etc. but it seems to me that an exact match should always be used. This is not an idle issue. The Adobe fonts that Mozilla settles on do not scale well at larger sizes.

You can see what happens at http://www2.cybernex.net/~tenthumbs/moz-tnr1.png. I used a fonts.alias file that gives Times New Roman another faily name so I could use it. Ignore the title, it's actually 48pt type.

BTW, Helvetica is being used instead of Arial, which can't be good. If it were me, I would use this font mapping only on the default types, i.e. serif, sans-serif, monospaced, etc. This way if a page specifies font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif then only the last would be mapped. This may be hard, though.

There are several ripple-through effects of this bug. If you have bitmapped fonts available for Times, Courier, and Helvetica, as is common under X, Mozilla seems to be inconsistent about what DPI it asks for fonts in. In particular, my display is set to 100 DPI (100x100, in fact), I have 100 DPI fonts listed, yet Mozilla will happily ask for 75 DPI fonts (as well as 100 DPI ones). The best tool for seeing this is judicious use of the xmon program (available in /contrib at ftp.x.org, I believe). Mozilla will do this even if I have scalable versions of them. Next, the normal Unix global.css specifies the default UI font as 'arial,helvetica,sans-serif'. This means that Mozilla will wind up using bitmapped Helvetica for its UI font -- quite possibly at 75 DPI, too. No wonder some Linux/Unix people are complaining that the UI fonts are too small. Checking with xmon shows that Mozilla is doing XListFonts against Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier New, so it knows that they're there and can be used (like TenThumbs, I have TrueType versions of them available). It's just that the code overrides this and uses the bitmapped fonts instead. Indeed, on second look the existence of this code in the GTK code may be quite odd, since up in gfx/src/nsDeviceContext.cpp we seem to have code (in DeviceContextImpl::CreateFontAliasTable()) that carefully builds aliases (both ways!) for the affected fonts, checking to see if it's necessary or not.

Fixed by first checking for the names directly (e.g. "Times New Roman") and if that fails, we try aliases (e.g. "times").

Marking verified on Linux May 22 build.