Hi, people
Some sites I visit are displayed with text rendering problems when I see them in FX3 on F10. However, FX3 on Windows displays them correctly. I've setup fonts in the Linux version exactly the same as they are in Windows. Most common problems is text being truncated, or text that should be displayed in one line being broken in two lines, sometimes with the second line being truncated, sometimes with it overwriting other text. Besides font configuration, what else may be causing this problems?
Thanks,
Marcelo
"Marcelo Magno T. Sales" mmtsales@gmail.com writes:
Hi, people
Some sites I visit are displayed with text rendering problems when I see them in FX3 on F10. However, FX3 on Windows displays them correctly. I've setup fonts in the Linux version exactly the same as they are in Windows. Most common problems is text being truncated, or text that should be displayed in one line being broken in two lines, sometimes with the second line being truncated, sometimes with it overwriting other text. Besides font configuration, what else may be causing this problems?
Thanks,
Marcelo
I suspect that is has to do with some interaction between Gecko, Cairo and Pango. There are many posts in various fora discussing both font rendering and page layout problems with FF under Linux.
One of my favorite "broken" web sites using FF on Linux is Computerworld:
The entire navigation column that is supposed to be on the left hand side of the page is in fact centered, resulting in the primary page content being pushed down to below the navigation column.
If you want to help (though the above should be a well known example), in FF using the menus, go to:
Help -> Report Broken Web Site...
and submit a report.
HTH,
Marc Schwartz
Em Sáb 20 Dez 2008, Marc Schwartz escreveu:
"Marcelo Magno T. Sales" mmtsales@gmail.com writes:
Hi, people
Some sites I visit are displayed with text rendering problems when I see them in FX3 on F10. However, FX3 on Windows displays them correctly. I've setup fonts in the Linux version exactly the same as they are in Windows. Most common problems is text being truncated, or text that should be displayed in one line being broken in two lines, sometimes with the second line being truncated, sometimes with it overwriting other text. Besides font configuration, what else may be causing this problems?
Thanks,
Marcelo
I suspect that is has to do with some interaction between Gecko, Cairo and Pango. There are many posts in various fora discussing both font rendering and page layout problems with FF under Linux.
One of my favorite "broken" web sites using FF on Linux is Computerworld:
The entire navigation column that is supposed to be on the left hand side of the page is in fact centered, resulting in the primary page content being pushed down to below the navigation column.
Funny, this site is displayed perfectly here. However, I've seen others displayed exactly they way you described, but I don't know if they look correctly in FX3 on Windows. Very weird...
[]'s Marcelo
Renders fine for me...
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008111217 Fedora/3.0.4-1.fc10 Firefox/3.0.4
[ormandj@ormandj-laptop ~]$ rpm -qi firefox Name : firefox Relocations: (not relocatable) Version : 3.0.4 Vendor: Fedora Project Release : 1.fc10 Build Date: Wed 12 Nov 2008 06:53:20 PM CST Install Date: Wed 19 Nov 2008 03:18:29 PM CST Build Host: xenbuilder2.fedora.redhat.com Group : Applications/Internet Source RPM: firefox-3.0.4-1.fc10.src.rpm Size : 14829514 License: MPLv1.1 or GPLv2+ or LGPLv2+ Signature : DSA/SHA1, Thu 13 Nov 2008 05:54:21 PM CST, Key ID bf226fcc4ebfc273 Packager : Fedora Project URL : http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/ Summary : Mozilla Firefox Web browser Description : Mozilla Firefox is an open-source web browser, designed for standards compliance, performance and portability. [ormandj@ormandj-laptop ~]$
Only plugin in FF is Adblock Plus.
On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 11:11 PM, Marcelo Magno T. Sales <mmtsales@gmail.com
wrote:
Em Sáb 20 Dez 2008, Marc Schwartz escreveu:
"Marcelo Magno T. Sales" mmtsales@gmail.com writes:
Hi, people
Some sites I visit are displayed with text rendering problems when I see them in FX3 on F10. However, FX3 on Windows displays them correctly. I've setup fonts in the Linux version exactly the same as they are in Windows. Most common problems is text being truncated, or text that should be displayed in one line being broken in two lines, sometimes with the second line being truncated, sometimes with it overwriting other text. Besides font configuration, what else may be causing this problems?
Thanks,
Marcelo
I suspect that is has to do with some interaction between Gecko, Cairo and Pango. There are many posts in various fora discussing both font rendering and page layout problems with FF under Linux.
One of my favorite "broken" web sites using FF on Linux is Computerworld:
The entire navigation column that is supposed to be on the left hand side of the page is in fact centered, resulting in the primary page content being pushed down to below the navigation column.
Funny, this site is displayed perfectly here. However, I've seen others displayed exactly they way you described, but I don't know if they look correctly in FX3 on Windows. Very weird...
[]'s Marcelo
-- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
"David Orman" ormandj@corenode.com writes:
Renders fine for me...
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008111217 Fedora/ 3.0.4-1.fc10 Firefox/3.0.4
<snip>
Only plugin in FF is Adblock Plus.
On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 11:11 PM, Marcelo Magno T. Sales mmtsales@gmail.com wrote:
Em Sáb 20 Dez 2008, Marc Schwartz escreveu: > "Marcelo Magno T. Sales" <mmtsales@gmail.com> writes: > > Hi, people > > > > Some sites I visit are displayed with text rendering problems when > > I see them in FX3 on F10. However, FX3 on Windows displays them > > correctly. I've setup fonts in the Linux version exactly the same > > as they are in Windows. > > Most common problems is text being truncated, or text that should > > be displayed in one line being broken in two lines, sometimes with > > the second line being truncated, sometimes with it overwriting > > other text. Besides font configuration, what else may be causing > > this problems? > > > > Thanks, > > > > Marcelo > > I suspect that is has to do with some interaction between Gecko, > Cairo and Pango. There are many posts in various fora discussing both > font rendering and page layout problems with FF under Linux. > > One of my favorite "broken" web sites using FF on Linux is > Computerworld: > > http://www.computerworld.com/ > > The entire navigation column that is supposed to be on the left hand > side of the page is in fact centered, resulting in the primary page > content being pushed down to below the navigation column. Funny, this site is displayed perfectly here. However, I've seen others displayed exactly they way you described, but I don't know if they look correctly in FX3 on Windows. Very weird... []'s Marcelo
That's interesting. I am using the same FF version (3.0.4) on F10, albeit 32 bit and no matter what I do, I cannot get the page to display correctly. I have either disabled or uninstalled all add-ins to no effect.
It's also not clear to me that any other preference settings are relevant.
It renders fine on my wife's iMac in FF 3 and in Safari, which seems typical of other comments that I have seen in other fora regarding rendering on Linux specifically.
Go figure.
Marc
Marc Schwartz marc_schwartz@comcast.net writes:
That's interesting. I am using the same FF version (3.0.4) on F10, albeit 32 bit and no matter what I do, I cannot get the page to display correctly. I have either disabled or uninstalled all add-ins to no effect.
It's also not clear to me that any other preference settings are relevant.
It renders fine on my wife's iMac in FF 3 and in Safari, which seems typical of other comments that I have seen in other fora regarding rendering on Linux specifically.
Go figure.
Marc
Apologies for replying to my own post here, but I have some follow up information that should be helpful.
Turns out there is an interaction with FF3 and Xorg as reported here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411831
and here:
http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15098
Going back to the Computerworld.com home page problems that I observe, here is an image of the page using FF *2*, which I DL'd from Mozilla and ran locally:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF2.png
You can see that the page looks just fine.
Here is the same page using FF 3.1 Beta 2, which I also DL'd from Mozilla, just to be sure that the same behavior is still present. BTW, this happens in 3.0.5, which was just released for F10 and is now the default version on my system:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF31B2-1.png
You can see the top of the page, where the left hand navigation column is centered, pushing the other content below it. Here is a second picture of the same page, scrolled down, so that you can see the transition to the main content:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF31B2-2.png
Based upon the above bug reports, it looks like the problem is going to be around for a while...
HTH,
Marc Schwartz
Just out of curiosity, move ~/.mozilla somewhere else temporarily, then give it a shot. That'll get rid of all plugins/customized settings/etc. Start FF, and see what you get. I just upgraded FF to 3.0.5 and it still displays fine. I'm running Adblock Plus 1.x currently, and nothing else. Disabled noscript and firebug for the time being. When you're done, move the directoy back to restore all your settings/etc (remove the new one).
Cheers, David
On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 7:06 PM, Marc Schwartz marc_schwartz@comcast.netwrote:
Marc Schwartz marc_schwartz@comcast.net writes:
That's interesting. I am using the same FF version (3.0.4) on F10, albeit 32 bit and no matter what I do, I cannot get the page to display correctly. I have either disabled or uninstalled all add-ins to no effect.
It's also not clear to me that any other preference settings are relevant.
It renders fine on my wife's iMac in FF 3 and in Safari, which seems typical of other comments that I have seen in other fora regarding rendering on Linux specifically.
Go figure.
Marc
Apologies for replying to my own post here, but I have some follow up information that should be helpful.
Turns out there is an interaction with FF3 and Xorg as reported here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411831
and here:
http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15098
Going back to the Computerworld.com home page problems that I observe, here is an image of the page using FF *2*, which I DL'd from Mozilla and ran locally:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF2.pnghttp://home.comcast.net/%7Emarc_schwartz/FF2.png
You can see that the page looks just fine.
Here is the same page using FF 3.1 Beta 2, which I also DL'd from Mozilla, just to be sure that the same behavior is still present. BTW, this happens in 3.0.5, which was just released for F10 and is now the default version on my system:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF31B2-1.pnghttp://home.comcast.net/%7Emarc_schwartz/FF31B2-1.png
You can see the top of the page, where the left hand navigation column is centered, pushing the other content below it. Here is a second picture of the same page, scrolled down, so that you can see the transition to the main content:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF31B2-2.pnghttp://home.comcast.net/%7Emarc_schwartz/FF31B2-2.png
Based upon the above bug reports, it looks like the problem is going to be around for a while...
HTH,
Marc Schwartz
-- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Em Dom 21 Dez 2008, Marc Schwartz escreveu:
Marc Schwartz marc_schwartz@comcast.net writes:
That's interesting. I am using the same FF version (3.0.4) on F10, albeit 32 bit and no matter what I do, I cannot get the page to display correctly. I have either disabled or uninstalled all add-ins to no effect.
It's also not clear to me that any other preference settings are relevant.
It renders fine on my wife's iMac in FF 3 and in Safari, which seems typical of other comments that I have seen in other fora regarding rendering on Linux specifically.
Go figure.
Marc
Apologies for replying to my own post here, but I have some follow up information that should be helpful.
Turns out there is an interaction with FF3 and Xorg as reported here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411831
and here:
http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15098
Going back to the Computerworld.com home page problems that I observe, here is an image of the page using FF *2*, which I DL'd from Mozilla and ran locally:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF2.png
You can see that the page looks just fine.
Here is the same page using FF 3.1 Beta 2, which I also DL'd from Mozilla, just to be sure that the same behavior is still present. BTW, this happens in 3.0.5, which was just released for F10 and is now the default version on my system:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF31B2-1.png
You can see the top of the page, where the left hand navigation column is centered, pushing the other content below it. Here is a second picture of the same page, scrolled down, so that you can see the transition to the main content:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF31B2-2.png
Based upon the above bug reports, it looks like the problem is going to be around for a while...
I may be wrong, but these bugs don't seem to be related to the problem we were describing. And I think I've seen this issue in sites with no images, although I can't remember any right now. But see this one, for instance: http://www.itaupersonnalite.com.br
For me, the two text box to the right of "Conta:" are in two lines, but should be in the same line (FX3 on Windows show them in one line, as does Internet Explorer). Ok, in this case there are images in the same horizontal. However, look at the menu below the gray area at the top. The last link, "Seja um cliente", should be in one line too, but the line has been broken and the second one is truncated horizontally. I think there are no images here that may be causing the problem. Is this site displayed wrong for you too?
[]'s Marcelo
"David Orman" ormandj@corenode.com writes:
Just out of curiosity, move ~/.mozilla somewhere else temporarily, then give it a shot. That'll get rid of all plugins/customized settings/etc. Start FF, and see what you get. I just upgraded FF to 3.0.5 and it still displays fine. I'm running Adblock Plus 1.x currently, and nothing else. Disabled noscript and firebug for the time being. When you're done, move the directoy back to restore all your settings/etc (remove the new one).
Cheers, David
Didn't help. I had tried that approach previously, based upon some posts I found on Ubuntu forums, where folks had suggested the same thing.
There seems to be some specific conditions under which this phenomenon exhibits itself. These seem to be xorg.conf settings, video driver and certain image factors that appear to result in the shifting of page layouts. I have not noted this behavior on largely text only pages.
From my reading of the bug reports and integrating that behavior with
other posts, this problem appears to now have a known cause, though the solution is not imminent given the graphic interface issues raised in the Mozilla and Freedesktop reports.
Thanks,
Marc
"Marcelo Magno T. Sales" mmtsales@gmail.com writes:
Em Dom 21 Dez 2008, Marc Schwartz escreveu:
Marc Schwartz marc_schwartz@comcast.net writes:
That's interesting. I am using the same FF version (3.0.4) on F10, albeit 32 bit and no matter what I do, I cannot get the page to display correctly. I have either disabled or uninstalled all add-ins to no effect.
It's also not clear to me that any other preference settings are relevant.
It renders fine on my wife's iMac in FF 3 and in Safari, which seems typical of other comments that I have seen in other fora regarding rendering on Linux specifically.
Go figure.
Marc
Apologies for replying to my own post here, but I have some follow up information that should be helpful.
Turns out there is an interaction with FF3 and Xorg as reported here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411831
and here:
http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15098
Going back to the Computerworld.com home page problems that I observe, here is an image of the page using FF *2*, which I DL'd from Mozilla and ran locally:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF2.png
You can see that the page looks just fine.
Here is the same page using FF 3.1 Beta 2, which I also DL'd from Mozilla, just to be sure that the same behavior is still present. BTW, this happens in 3.0.5, which was just released for F10 and is now the default version on my system:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF31B2-1.png
You can see the top of the page, where the left hand navigation column is centered, pushing the other content below it. Here is a second picture of the same page, scrolled down, so that you can see the transition to the main content:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF31B2-2.png
Based upon the above bug reports, it looks like the problem is going to be around for a while...
I may be wrong, but these bugs don't seem to be related to the problem we were describing. And I think I've seen this issue in sites with no images, although I can't remember any right now. But see this one, for instance: http://www.itaupersonnalite.com.br
For me, the two text box to the right of "Conta:" are in two lines, but should be in the same line (FX3 on Windows show them in one line, as does Internet Explorer). Ok, in this case there are images in the same horizontal. However, look at the menu below the gray area at the top. The last link, "Seja um cliente", should be in one line too, but the line has been broken and the second one is truncated horizontally. I think there are no images here that may be causing the problem. Is this site displayed wrong for you too?
[]'s Marcelo
Yes, that page is broken for me as well, in the same ways as you describe.
As I noted in my other reply just now, this behavior seems to have a known cause, the etiology of which is some combination of xorg.conf settings, video driver and image characteristics.
Contrary to your initial comments above, I do think that these bug reports are relevant to what we are observing, especially since the problem is consistent with not being present in FF2, which is what others have also observed. The initial preception was that this was a major regression of sorts in FF3, but it now appears to be known that there are other factors at play.
Regards,
Marc
On Sun, 2008-12-21 at 19:06 -0600, Marc Schwartz wrote:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF2.png
You can see that the page looks just fine.
Here is the same page using FF 3.1 Beta 2, which I also DL'd from Mozilla, just to be sure that the same behavior is still present. BTW, this happens in 3.0.5, which was just released for F10 and is now the default version on my system:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF31B2-1.png
You can see the top of the page, where the left hand navigation column is centered, pushing the other content below it. Here is a second picture of the same page, scrolled down, so that you can see the transition to the main content:
This looks more like CSS issues (or JavaScript, if they're messing with JavaScript to style the page). You might narrow your problem down by reloading the page with one or the other disabled, separately.
But, for what it's worth, the site in the screengrab looks fine, loaded directly here on Firefox 3.0.4 on Fedora 9. So I can't absolutely reason why it does that, from my side of the fence. However...
Font sizing often has peculiar effects on page layout. The authors wrote the page using a particular size (either specified on their pages, or set in their browsers), and it worked fine, for them. But someone else with a different font size (because they set their browser configuration differently, or their X resolution and scaling of fonts changed the proportions of things) may see page layouts move about in odd ways.
The most common one is things wrapping oddly (e.g. like Marcelos's example page from the Brazil website - set your browser with midget fonts favoured by many designers, and it might work as expected; if your fonts were originally too big to be seen properly in a text gadget, that's a strong indication of that cause and reason). And CSS repositioned objects (e.g. floats) can move places radically, from where the designer expected them to land, as the browser tries to fit them in to available/calculated space.
The above issues generally coming about where ignorant web authors have tried to fix the layout of a page, against the design philosophy of webpages, with disregard for everyone's browsers not being all the same. HTML+CSS is not a page layout system (in the way that print publishing is), and things fall apart when stupid design assumptions are made.
Em Seg 22 Dez 2008, Marc Schwartz escreveu:
"Marcelo Magno T. Sales" mmtsales@gmail.com writes:
Em Dom 21 Dez 2008, Marc Schwartz escreveu:
Marc Schwartz marc_schwartz@comcast.net writes:
That's interesting. I am using the same FF version (3.0.4) on F10, albeit 32 bit and no matter what I do, I cannot get the page to display correctly. I have either disabled or uninstalled all add-ins to no effect.
It's also not clear to me that any other preference settings are relevant.
It renders fine on my wife's iMac in FF 3 and in Safari, which seems typical of other comments that I have seen in other fora regarding rendering on Linux specifically.
Go figure.
Marc
Apologies for replying to my own post here, but I have some follow up information that should be helpful.
Turns out there is an interaction with FF3 and Xorg as reported here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411831
and here:
http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15098
Going back to the Computerworld.com home page problems that I observe, here is an image of the page using FF *2*, which I DL'd from Mozilla and ran locally:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF2.png
You can see that the page looks just fine.
Here is the same page using FF 3.1 Beta 2, which I also DL'd from Mozilla, just to be sure that the same behavior is still present. BTW, this happens in 3.0.5, which was just released for F10 and is now the default version on my system:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF31B2-1.png
You can see the top of the page, where the left hand navigation column is centered, pushing the other content below it. Here is a second picture of the same page, scrolled down, so that you can see the transition to the main content:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF31B2-2.png
Based upon the above bug reports, it looks like the problem is going to be around for a while...
I may be wrong, but these bugs don't seem to be related to the problem we were describing. And I think I've seen this issue in sites with no images, although I can't remember any right now. But see this one, for instance: http://www.itaupersonnalite.com.br
For me, the two text box to the right of "Conta:" are in two lines, but should be in the same line (FX3 on Windows show them in one line, as does Internet Explorer). Ok, in this case there are images in the same horizontal. However, look at the menu below the gray area at the top. The last link, "Seja um cliente", should be in one line too, but the line has been broken and the second one is truncated horizontally. I think there are no images here that may be causing the problem. Is this site displayed wrong for you too?
[]'s Marcelo
Yes, that page is broken for me as well, in the same ways as you describe.
As I noted in my other reply just now, this behavior seems to have a known cause, the etiology of which is some combination of xorg.conf settings, video driver and image characteristics.
Contrary to your initial comments above, I do think that these bug reports are relevant to what we are observing, especially since the problem is consistent with not being present in FF2, which is what others have also observed. The initial preception was that this was a major regression of sorts in FF3, but it now appears to be known that there are other factors at play.
Ok, Marc, I'll study more carefully those bug reports. Maybe xorg problems have impact on other things besides transparent images. Thanks very much for the info.
[]'s Marcelo
Hi, Tim,
Em Seg 22 Dez 2008, Tim escreveu:
On Sun, 2008-12-21 at 19:06 -0600, Marc Schwartz wrote:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF2.png
You can see that the page looks just fine.
Here is the same page using FF 3.1 Beta 2, which I also DL'd from Mozilla, just to be sure that the same behavior is still present. BTW, this happens in 3.0.5, which was just released for F10 and is now the default version on my system:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF31B2-1.png
You can see the top of the page, where the left hand navigation column is centered, pushing the other content below it. Here is a second picture of the same page, scrolled down, so that you can see the transition to the main content:
This looks more like CSS issues (or JavaScript, if they're messing with JavaScript to style the page). You might narrow your problem down by reloading the page with one or the other disabled, separately.
But, for what it's worth, the site in the screengrab looks fine, loaded directly here on Firefox 3.0.4 on Fedora 9. So I can't absolutely reason why it does that, from my side of the fence. However...
Font sizing often has peculiar effects on page layout. The authors wrote the page using a particular size (either specified on their pages, or set in their browsers), and it worked fine, for them. But someone else with a different font size (because they set their browser configuration differently, or their X resolution and scaling of fonts changed the proportions of things) may see page layouts move about in odd ways.
But I did test that site (http://www.itaupersonnalite.com.br in FX3 on Linux with exactly the same font configuration that I had set up in FX3 on Windows. The windows version displays the site correctly, the linux version does not. There's something more than font configuration here. Anyway, thanks for the info you have provided.
[]'s Marcelo
"Marcelo Magno T. Sales" mmtsales@gmail.com writes:
<snip>
Ok, Marc, I'll study more carefully those bug reports. Maybe xorg problems have impact on other things besides transparent images. Thanks very much for the info.
Marcelo,
I might end up owing you an apology on this, but my premise for believing that the bugs are relevant is that if the images are not scaled and rendered correctly and if they are in a relative or absolute position and sizes based upon a table structure and/or a CSS spec, then they could feasibly result in the page layout being shifted around and screwed up. This could include entire sections of a page, as is the case with CW, or with smaller images such as buttons and such, where the impact is more subtle.
Two pieces of information that might defer us from those bugs is that the proposed workarounds for them, which include:
1. Setting "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" to "True" in xorg.conf does not help.
2. Using 'MOZ_DISABLE_IMAGE_OPTIMIZE=1 firefox' from the CLI does not help.
I have filed a bug report using the Computerworld home page as a reference:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=470766
I guess we will see what they come back with on this.
Note that as per Tim's reply, I did try to disable JS in FF3 and reloaded the CW page. It did seem to result in the page at least being structured properly, though there were other problems as a result.
So I am not convinced that JS alone is the culprit and that there is something in the page layout as a result of the JS code that FF3, specifically on Linux, with some particular combination of X server, xorg.conf, Cairo and Pango does not work properly. There are just too many posts on various fora on differing distributions, which all seem to come back to something in the page rendering in FF3 changing.
It is possible, as noted in some of the posts, that whatever has changed in FF3 is now revealing a heretofore unknown bug in X on Linux or some interaction with the aforementioned components and specs. That may be why the behavior is inconsistent, along with perhaps screen resolution and dpi settings.
The original bug reports suggested that these problems were limited to nVidia based systems, but there are sufficient posts by folks with ATI cards, that this does not appear to be GPU specific.
None of this occurs on my wife's iMac using the same version of FF for any of these pages and as noted, it does not occur with FF2 or even Seamonkey on my machine, all else being the same. As you and others have noted, this does not happen on Windows either, further reinforcing this issue being unique to Linux based systems.
BTW, on your referenced page, if I do remove the minimum font size setting in Preferences, it does help a bit, but there are still some things that do no display properly. Altering the font sizing on the CW page had no effect for me.
With the pending holidays, I don't know how quickly the Mozilla bug will solicit a reply, but I'll stay tuned to see how it plays out.
Regards,
Marc
Tim ignored_mailbox@yahoo.com.au writes:
On Sun, 2008-12-21 at 19:06 -0600, Marc Schwartz wrote:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF2.png
You can see that the page looks just fine.
Here is the same page using FF 3.1 Beta 2, which I also DL'd from Mozilla, just to be sure that the same behavior is still present. BTW, this happens in 3.0.5, which was just released for F10 and is now the default version on my system:
http://home.comcast.net/~marc_schwartz/FF31B2-1.png
You can see the top of the page, where the left hand navigation column is centered, pushing the other content below it. Here is a second picture of the same page, scrolled down, so that you can see the transition to the main content:
This looks more like CSS issues (or JavaScript, if they're messing with JavaScript to style the page). You might narrow your problem down by reloading the page with one or the other disabled, separately.
But, for what it's worth, the site in the screengrab looks fine, loaded directly here on Firefox 3.0.4 on Fedora 9. So I can't absolutely reason why it does that, from my side of the fence. However...
Font sizing often has peculiar effects on page layout. The authors wrote the page using a particular size (either specified on their pages, or set in their browsers), and it worked fine, for them. But someone else with a different font size (because they set their browser configuration differently, or their X resolution and scaling of fonts changed the proportions of things) may see page layouts move about in odd ways.
The most common one is things wrapping oddly (e.g. like Marcelos's example page from the Brazil website - set your browser with midget fonts favoured by many designers, and it might work as expected; if your fonts were originally too big to be seen properly in a text gadget, that's a strong indication of that cause and reason). And CSS repositioned objects (e.g. floats) can move places radically, from where the designer expected them to land, as the browser tries to fit them in to available/calculated space.
The above issues generally coming about where ignorant web authors have tried to fix the layout of a page, against the design philosophy of webpages, with disregard for everyone's browsers not being all the same. HTML+CSS is not a page layout system (in the way that print publishing is), and things fall apart when stupid design assumptions are made.
Tim,
Thanks for your comments.
See my reply to Marcelo on this, where I respond to the current state of things and the impact of disabling JS on the CW page.
Thanks,
Marc
On Mon, 2008-12-22 at 13:35 -0300, Marcelo Magno T. Sales wrote:
I did test that site (http://www.itaupersonnalite.com.br in FX3 on Linux with exactly the same font configuration that I had set up in FX3 on Windows. The windows version displays the site correctly, the linux version does not.
Same screen resolutions, too? (Pixel size, and DPI.)
Em Seg 22 Dez 2008, Tim escreveu:
On Mon, 2008-12-22 at 13:35 -0300, Marcelo Magno T. Sales wrote:
I did test that site (http://www.itaupersonnalite.com.br in FX3 on Linux with exactly the same font configuration that I had set up in FX3 on Windows. The windows version displays the site correctly, the linux version does not.
Same screen resolutions, too? (Pixel size, and DPI.)
No, different resolutions. Unfortunately, I do not have available any machine dual booting Windows and Linux to test this on the same hardware. My computer at work (Windows) and my home computers (Linux) have different monitors.
[]'s Marcelo