[PLUG] Wanted: Firefox Configuration Guru Help

[Daniel Hedlund]

Daniel Hedlund wrote:
> 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.

I've continued on playing a bit more with the font issue in Firefox.  I
have some additional contributions to make that may help Rich.

I can very easily make Firefox reproduce the same postscript generation
problems that Rich has by loading Firefox:
1. Visit news.google.com.

2. Remove the msttcorefonts package (which has the Arial font the page's
CSS defaults to) or move the '/usr/share/fonts/msttcorefonts' directory
to something else.

3. Click on "print preview".  The page contains some text (page headers
and a couple other pieces), but the main body of text doesn't exist in
the postscript.  This matches exactly with what Rich's postscript looks
like.

Restarting Firefox causes Firefox to choose a different default font
that does exist though, unlike what is happening for Rich which keeps
choosing a bad font.

I mentioned that Rich could have a bad font, so I tried creating some
scenarios that would cause bad font problems to persist across Firefox
restarts.

1. I have tried moving fonts out of the '/usr/share/fonts' path, but
when Firefox starts it just defaults the postscript output to another
font.  There are still entries in the font server's path, as checked
with 'chkfontpath -l'.

2. I have tried moving/renaming fonts but keeping them within the
'/usr/share/fonts' directory.  Firefox doesn't complain and finds the
font anyway, because the font server scans for all files and gets their
name from internally within the file(?).

3. I've tried setting fonts to have their permissions set to 0600.
Trying to start Firefox, which is set to use the font, fails to start
altogether.

4. I've tried setting fonts to have their permissions set to 0600 after
Firefox has been started but before doing a print preview.  Firefox
crashes when trying to preview.

5. I've tried corrupting fonts by inserting random data randomly through 
about 2% of the file.  I made sure to leave the header definitions 
intact that define the name of the font and its capabilities).  Firefox 
was willing to start with and use the corrupt font.  It mostly just 
displayed very odd looking characters on the screen.  The print preview 
showed the same random oddities, but not "no text".  Surprisingly it 
didn't even crash like I was expecting.

Overall, I can't seem to create a font or modify any settings that would 
cause Firefox not to detect a bad/missing font when it starts up.  I've 
had a look into fc-cache/list/cat to examine whether fonts were 
disappearing from the font lists when moving or modifying them. 
Everything appeared as I expected, ie. moving fonts out of font 
directory removed them from the list, etc.

Anyone have any other suggestions as to how the font server might 
provide a bad printer font to Firefox and/or ways to fool the browser 
into thinking there's a font that doesn't exist?

Cheers,

Daniel Hedlund
daniel at digitree.org