wine font changes system look and feel

[Andreas Bierfert]

Hi,

first I would like to point out that I am totally open for a discussion
about this. IMO bugzilla is just not the right place for it.

As you have pointed out there are two aspects on this: A technical part
and a subjective part about the look and feel.

I guess we can agree that the technical part of font installation etc.
is done like it should be. However, it is _not_ the wine-tahoma-fonts
package which bullies its way and changes the system look and fell on
its own. There are some web-pages which (maybe unintentionally)
explicitly request a tahoma font and if you have wine installed - beware
- they get what they request.

You argue they do so as a fallback which under 'normal' circumstances
should never be used. My question would then be why we do reach this
point in the first place. Maybe that is a starting point where we can
improve.

We can also argue about the look and feel of the wine tahoma font itself
and get to the point where we can vote if this is an ugly or a pretty
font. I as a packager will not keep this freedom of choice from the
fedora users. As a packager I, however, find it important that for the
use-case of wine the best available user experience is provided. Hence
this font needs to be included an pulled in by wine like it is today.

Now the question remains if there is action needed on this issue. As I
understand that some users do not like the wine tahoma font, the package
as been adopted to disable bitmaps by default and instructions have been
added on how to disable the font.

I am sure the font itself could be improved in certain ways, so if there
are skilled people who want to work on it I urge them to get in contact
with upstream.

For me the remaining issue is what has been mentioned in comment
rhbz693180#37 about the tahomabd.ttf file. If this is the case we should
see to get it fixed upstream. If it cannot be done upstream I am open
for discussions to add a workaround which would be to either exclude
tahomabd.ttf completely or get an exception to put it into wines own
font dir till it is fixed.

Regards,
Andreas

On Mon, 2012-06-04 at 05:04 -0400, Kamil Paral wrote:
> > I'd like to brought to wider attention the bug
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=693180
> > 
> > What's the matter?
> > 
> > If you install wine, it brings as a dependency wine-tahoma font, that
> > is
> > then included in system wide fonts list. This causes the font to be
> > used
> > by applications like Firefox when pages require tahoma. As the font
> > is
> > badly looking, it makes many things to look terrible.
> > 
> > Some of us think, this font should be made specific for the wine
> > application and not used system wide as it breaks the look and feel
> > of too
> > many things.
> > 
> > Please make your voice to be heard on that.
> > 
> > 
> > Adam Pribyl
> 
> Adam, it might be better to cross-post this also to devel@ list, doing that now.
> 
> I believe there are a few good engineering practices that every software should keep. One of them is that installing one application should not have detrimental effects to another application. That is violated here. Installing wine brings broken fonts (Tahoma, maybe some others) into the system and then have detrimental effects on font rendering in web applications. We should do something about it.
> 
> It is unfortunate that wine package maintainer doesn't want to discuss this issue any further. To some extent, he is even right. Wine depends on a font and fonts are installed into system-wide directories. Web pages request that font. End of story. But the reality is not perfect and often we have to do compromises. This is another obstacle presented by Microsoft to the opensource world and we can't simply insist on that "one and only correct solution". Because we know Tahoma rendering looks better on Windows and furthermore the web pages don't use it at all, it's just a fallback for some other font present in Windows but not in Linux.
> 
> Our excuse is that there is a README in wine-tahoma-fonts package documenting how to blacklist it if you don't want it. Yes, but that doesn't help. We need Fedora to look good by default. I have heard several people saying "Fonts are ugly in Fedora, I'll rather use Ubuntu instead". And guess what, Ubuntu has made these broken wine fonts wine-specific, so that they are used in wine but not in other system applications. You might disagree with their other endeavors, but they care about their user-base. Putting some info in a README is good for hackers, but it is useless for end-users.
> 
> I believe the best solution here is to make Tahoma (and maybe some other fonts that are rendered horribly) a wine-specific font. Then add a README how to make those fonts available for all applications, if someone ever needs that. Or we can create a separate package for system-wide installation. This way we will have reasonable defaults and more happy users.
> 
> Anyone, if you have a better suggestion how to solve this problem, please be heard. The desirable outcome is:
> 1. Wine is installed
> 2. Web page rendering looks pretty (no bitmap fonts)
> 3. No manual steps are needed
> 
> Comments welcome.

-- 
Andreas Bierfert <andreas.bierfert at lowlatency.de>
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