Will they ever fix font rendering in firefox 4?

Discussion about official Mozilla Firefox builds
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psishock
Posts: 150
Joined: February 9th, 2011, 5:11 am

Re: Will they ever fix font rendering in firefox 4?

Post by psishock »

mattcoz wrote:
kliu0x52 wrote:Ideally, in the future, Firefox will be "smarter" and will default to whole pixel rendering for just those certain text sizes (DPI-adjusted) that would actually benefit from whole pixel rendering and use natural rendering for all other cases.

Yeah, hopefully they can figure out a way to do this.

AA tuner can already do something like this, now Mozilla could implement a similar way to chose from 2 separate rendering methods for certain font ranges. We can at least chose from one, and configure it with various sub-settings at this moment, without any extension. For starters its a very good workaround for the problem. :)
psishock
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Joined: February 9th, 2011, 5:11 am

Re: Will they ever fix font rendering in firefox 4?

Post by psishock »

I've just noticed that the AA tuner has stopped functioning (any setting is completely ignored by firefox) in recent Nightly builds. Anyone knows what happened?
KWierso
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Re: Will they ever fix font rendering in firefox 4?

Post by KWierso »

psishock wrote:I've just noticed that the AA tuner has stopped functioning (any setting is completely ignored by firefox) in recent Nightly builds. Anyone knows what happened?

Nightly has its own setting now in about:config related to it, although I thought that the ignoring worked the other way around...
psishock
Posts: 150
Joined: February 9th, 2011, 5:11 am

Re: Will they ever fix font rendering in firefox 4?

Post by psishock »

KWierso wrote:Nightly has its own setting now in about:config related to it, although I thought that the ignoring worked the other way around...

Yea, i knew this. Actually, they could coexist in a way, for instance you could use GDI for small fonts with normal letter positioning for small fonts, and Natural Symmetric for bigger ones. But now (in the last few Nighty builds) only the firefox render mode settings is checked, and AA tuner seems to be completely ignored, so you cannot play with it, nor have workarounds that the internal firefox render choices just couldn't archive.
avada
Posts: 1934
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Location: Hungary

Re: Will they ever fix font rendering in firefox 4?

Post by avada »

KWierso wrote:
psishock wrote:I've just noticed that the AA tuner has stopped functioning (any setting is completely ignored by firefox) in recent Nightly builds. Anyone knows what happened?

Nightly has its own setting now in about:config related to it, although I thought that the ignoring worked the other way around...

Something got broken besides that. If try and change "gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.rendering_mode" to anything besides -1 - 1 the pages aren't rendered properly.

By the way. Can anyone link a some sort of documentation of which about:config entry is the equivalent of the AA tuner settings? Currently I only get gray scale AA only.
psishock
Posts: 150
Joined: February 9th, 2011, 5:11 am

Re: Will they ever fix font rendering in firefox 4?

Post by psishock »

avada wrote:Something got broken besides that. If try and change "gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.rendering_mode" to anything besides -1 - 1 the pages aren't rendered properly.

They seems to work for me, GDI (2) and Natural Symmetric (5) is very much fine and does what intended for instance. But you have to restart the browser after a render mode change, to get the right letter positioning, or else it could get strangely messed up.

avada wrote:By the way. Can anyone link a some sort of documentation of which about:config entry is the equivalent of the AA tuner settings? Currently I only get gray scale AA only.

Didn't you (or something else) disabled ClearType in Windows? The result of that could be full grayscale antialiasing.
WonderCsabo
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Re: Will they ever fix font rendering in firefox 4?

Post by WonderCsabo »

avada
Posts: 1934
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Re: Will they ever fix font rendering in firefox 4?

Post by avada »

psishock wrote:They seems to work for me, GDI (2) and Natural Symmetric (5) is very much fine and does what intended for instance. But you have to restart the browser after a render mode change, to get the right letter positioning, or else it could get strangely messed up.

Didn't you (or something else) disabled ClearType in Windows? The result of that could be full grayscale antialiasing.

It is disabled. But with AA tuner I could enable it. It seems like that's what also caused the bug with stuff not appearing.
It looked like this:
Image Image

Seems OK now. Kind of a lame bug.
psishock
Posts: 150
Joined: February 9th, 2011, 5:11 am

Re: Will they ever fix font rendering in firefox 4?

Post by psishock »

avada wrote:It is disabled. But with AA tuner I could enable it.

If it was disabled in Windows all the time, then i'm almost sure you had only grayscale aa before too, even if you turned on "ClearType" mode in AA tuner. I've tested various settings in a month or two ago, and found out that disabling ClearType in Windows is causing full grayscale antialising in firefox if you use AA tuner's ClearType (same as decreasing the ClearType percentage in AA tuner to 0%). AA tuner's ClearType is directly dependent from Windows ClearType.

But i hope this strange, AA tuner extension "ignoring" bug will get fixed soon. It was a handy and somewhat necessary tool for tweaking stuffs.
avada
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Location: Hungary

Re: Will they ever fix font rendering in firefox 4?

Post by avada »

psishock wrote:If it was disabled in Windows all the time, then i'm almost sure you had only grayscale aa before too, even if you turned on "ClearType" mode in AA tuner. I've tested various settings in a month or two ago, and found out that disabling ClearType in Windows is causing full grayscale antialising in firefox if you use AA tuner's ClearType (same as decreasing the ClearType percentage in AA tuner to 0%). AA tuner's ClearType is directly dependent from Windows ClearType.

But i hope this strange, AA tuner extension "ignoring" bug will get fixed soon. It was a handy and somewhat necessary tool for tweaking stuffs.

Nope. It was sub-pixel. I made numerous screenshots while I had AA tuner enabled, and when I zoomed it the different colours were clearly visible.
psishock
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Joined: February 9th, 2011, 5:11 am

Re: Will they ever fix font rendering in firefox 4?

Post by psishock »

avada wrote:Nope. It was sub-pixel. I made numerous screenshots while I had AA tuner enabled, and when I zoomed it the different colours were clearly visible.

I see. So aa tuner was somewhat bugged even that time, because it behaved differently on my setup.
Laurentwb
Posts: 19
Joined: August 23rd, 2009, 12:44 am

Re: Will they ever fix font rendering in firefox 4?

Post by Laurentwb »

Hello,

The following parameters are existing in FF6 but not in previous versious (FF5 and FF4).
Font rendeirng is affected when changing the values in FF6.
When I create the parameters in FF5 and try to change the values, the changes remain without effect. Is theresomething I miss to do ?
Thanks

gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.gamma
gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.enhanced_contrast
gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.cleartype_level
gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.pixel_structure
gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.rendering_mode
teoli2003
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Re: Will they ever fix font rendering in firefox 4?

Post by teoli2003 »

Laurentwb wrote:When I create the parameters in FF5 and try to change the values, the changes remain without effect. Is there something I miss to do ?

No, these parameters may only be used in Fx 6 (and later), not in Fx 4.x.y, nor in the upcoming Fx 5.
besideourselves
Posts: 1
Joined: May 14th, 2011, 11:52 pm

Re: Will they ever fix font rendering in firefox 4?

Post by besideourselves »

@ Doomsday;

Go to about:config, set gfx.direct2d.disabled to true, and enjoy gdi fonts again with the added benefits of getting harware acceleration with Direct3D 9.


Legend! Worked a treat.

And yes under my nvidia rendering was also hideous and FF4 nearly unusable but you can only fend off updates for so long and I would almost rather go blind than blah blah blah ....

Thank you forum

=D>
Laurentwb
Posts: 19
Joined: August 23rd, 2009, 12:44 am

Re: Will they ever fix font rendering in firefox 4?

Post by Laurentwb »

Thanks.
Why is it so ?

I think I'll stick with nightly FF6 x86.
How important are the bugs that I may meet with it ? (for ex, I know that adobe flash does not work with FF6 x64)
Last edited by Laurentwb on May 15th, 2011, 3:36 am, edited 1 time in total.
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