[PLUG] Wanted: Firefox Configuration Guru Help

[Daniel Hedlund]

Aaron Burt wrote:
> So, in sum: something's deeply and weirdly screwed-up with either
> Firefox or system libraries that it uses, in a manner that is likely
> unique to this one system.  It has at least two symptoms, either of
> which makes the browser nearly useless to you.

Yes, something is messed up.  I've figured out what it is.  I've been 
able to recreate Rich's problem and am now trying to narrow down exactly 
which little variable is causing the fuss.  I'll explain a little bit 
about what I found out so far:

The postscript document that Rich provided me does not contain any text 
except for a couple of headers.  The body of text is definitely not 
present in the postscript file.

I noticed 'certain difference' between Rich's postscript source and mine 
which is that his printer output is using different fonts...the big 
difference is that mine were using the Arial-based font from the 
msttcorefonts package.  After I removed the package (but without 
restarting Firefox), my postscript output I generated failed in exactly 
the same way that Rich's did.  The website Rich gave me 
(news.google.com) uses Arial in its stylesheet.

My belief is Firefox is not selecting a reasonable alternative font when 
trying to generate his postscript document.  Firefox (or the postscript 
renderer) either doesn't know a good alternative font and is saying 
"I'll just skip it", or there is a font definition that it is choosing 
that just doesn't work.

After I restarted Firefox, my printing returned to normal and I was able 
to print the page fine again (without the Arial font).  The postscript 
output decided to default to whatever was one of the default fonts in 
Firefox depending on whether it was going to use a sans font or a 
sans-serif.  If Firefox didn't explicitly select a default font but just 
left it as "sans" or "sans-serif", then it would drop back to whatever 
the user-wide defaults for those values were, as defined in GNOME and 
possibly also by the font server.  In Firefox, leaving the serif font at 
"serif" would result in it using the GNOME's "Application font". 
Leaving the sans-serif font at "sans-serif" would result in the 
postscript using "Nimbus Roman" based fonts, regardless of the GNOME 
fonts I chose in the preferences.  This must be set elsewhere, possibly 
the font server.

As for Rich, he probably has some bad settings in his font server (a 
font or two that don't resolve).  He can get around this, for Firefox at 
least, by setting his default fonts to something he knows that works, 
maybe something like Bitstream Vera.

Cheers,

Daniel Hedlund
daniel at digitree.org