Wine fonts makes html rendering on firefox and chrome much worse

[Tim]

On Thu, 2011-06-30 at 18:38 -0300, fernando at lozano.eti.br wrote:
> I noticed the new system was missing some packages I use, I guess they
> come from rpmfusion: gnome-mplayer and wine. After installing those,
> the font problem in Firefox and Chrome was back again.
>  
> But this time I saved the output of rpm -qa at each step, then I
> compared the latest working state with the one that wasn't. I noticed
> there are a number of wine-*-fonts packages, and removed then (I also
> had to remove wine itself). Problem solved!
>  
> Can anyone explain why either wine itself (or wine fonts) interfere
> with web browser page rendering?

Most likely, because the wine supplied fonts were a better match
(name-wise, or otherwise) for the fonts requested in the web pages, even
if they render horribly.  I've always avoided installing any Microsoft
fonts, for that reason (they nearly always look horrid).

For example, if a webpage says to use Tahoma for the body text, your
system will either try to use it (if it's installed), or find an
alternative (based on a list of alternatives supplied by the website, or
a list of alternatives configured on your computer - there's some by
default, and you can add your own).  

The original font mayn't render well on Linux, since it was designed for
the text-rendering scheme used on Windows, which (probably) works
differently than ours.  An alternative mayn't render well for being a
different size (i.e. the original Microsoft was oversized, so the page
author specified it to be used at a smaller than normal size; your
alternative is normal sized, normally, but the page has it rendered at a
miniature font size).  You can play with configuring minimum font sizes
in your browser, but that can make everything too big.

> And how can I re-install wine without messing up with web page fonts?

Konstantin Svist's solution is probably the only way:  It causes Linux
to reject the use of some of those wine fonts.  Though that makes those
fonts unusable for anything that asks for them.

An alternative solution is to use user style sheets with your web
browser, to force the use of your own fonts, rather than what the
website wants you to use.  However, that has its drawbacks that some
websites will depend on being able to pick their own fonts and font
sizes, to fit the text into the layout of their page.  And you find
yourself trying to read pages with overlapping text, or only half the
height of the characters being visible inside HTML form gadgets, or
other similarly annoying issues.

There's no all-purpose always-good solution to this.


-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.