Ugly Text

[Jonathan Ryshpan]

On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 22:04 +0100, Frank Murphy wrote:
> On 11/08/10 21:46, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
> > Text to be printed by Firefox has disastrously bad text layout, and has
> > had bad layout for years.  An example is attached.  The only way to get
> > text well laid out is to copy it into a word processor (I use Open
> > Office) and to print it out from there.
> >
> > Who else has noticed this?  Is there a known cure, say by downloading
> > fonts, or font layout tables?

> You have not provided a link?

Quite right.  Sorry.  The link is:
        http://www.tnr.com/print/article/politics/76822/the-look-time


On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 16:54 -0400, Paul Cartwright wrote:
> just curious, why would you want to print a web page?
> I usually copy & paste any web page info to a word processor, and save it as a 
> text file, or just print then delete.. That saves printing all the stupid 
> ads, etc, on the web page. Or am I missing something?

Often the page doesn't have any such garbage on it, like the one linked
to above.


On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 14:01 -0700, JD wrote:
> Perhaps (I conjecture here) that the web page being
> viewed was created using Microsoft web tools
> which use features or attributes in the resulting web
> content, that FF simply does not know what to do with
> or implements them incorrectly.
> 
> Perhaps MS is highjacking the web page standards in
> the same way they had tried to highjack java.

Probably not.  The page linked to is from The New Republic.  I have
similar problems printing from the NY Times.


On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 17:33 -0400, Kwan Lowe wrote:
> You've hit it.. It's often missing fonts that cause bad rendering.
> There are some web core font packages you can install that will
> improve it.  You can also override the web page settings.

Are these the ttf.. packages mentioned below by JB?


On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 17:06 -0500, Jonathan Beatty wrote:
> There are some font packages that start with ttf (if I remember
> correctly) that fix this problem cleanly.

No useful looking packages starting ttf.  Here's a list of all packages
with ttf in their names:
        SDL_ttf.i686
        SDL_ttf.x86_64
        SDL_ttf-debuginfo.x86_64
        SDL_ttf-devel.i686
        SDL_ttf-devel.x86_64
        baekmuk-ttf-dotum-fonts.noarch
        baekmuk-ttf-fonts-common.noarch
        baekmuk-ttf-fonts-ghostscript.noarch
        baekmuk-ttf-gulim-fonts.noarch
        baekmuk-ttf-hline-fonts.noarch
        batik-ttf2svg.noarch
        brettfont-fonts.noarch
        perl-Font-TTF.noarch
        scottfree.x86_64
        ttf2pt1.x86_64
        ttf2pt1-debuginfo.x86_64
Which do you think are the ones wanted?

On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 20:14 -0400, fred smith wrote:
> Having not yet viewed your attached images, I need to ask: is it ugly
> characters/symbols, or is it the horrid layout?

It's horrid layout.

Thanks to all - jon