Some input on Asian font preferences we could consider.
-tom ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Masayuki Nakano" masayuki@d-toybox.com Date: Aug 23, 2017 12:20 AM Subject: Intent to ship: Changing default Japanese fonts to modern fonts To: dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org Cc:
Hi,
We decided that we should change our default Japanese fonts from legacy "MS PGothic" (sans-serif) and "MS PMincho" (serif) which have bitmap glyph to modern "Meiryo" or "Yu Gothic" (sans-serif) and "Yu Mincho" (serif).
This has been enabled on Nightly and early Beta since 55 [1].
Then, I removed the |#ifdef EARLY_BETA_OR_EARLIER| in Nightly yesterday [2]. I.e., the new default settings are enabled on release build starting from 57.
I'd like to introduce some backgrounds:
"Meiryo" is installed on Vista or later (but not installed on Win10 unless you add Japanese in system language settings). "Yu Gothic" and "Yu Mincho" is installed on Win8.1 or later.
Both Edge and Chrome already started to use "Meiryo" as their default Japanese fonts. So, using "Meiryo" improves the compatibility between browsers and just looks better and is easier to read than bitmap glyph.
One of the reason why we didn't use "Meiryo" as default fonts is, "Meiryo" has normal style glyph as italic style glyph. E.g., |a<i>b</i>c| looks like |abc|, not |a/b/c|. The other browsers have this issue, but I see many users who complain about this issue. For solving this issue, we added a hack to ignore italic style family of "Meiryo" at loading fonts [3]. So, now, Gecko is the only one engine which supports italic style Japanese text with default fonts!
On the other hand, there are still some problems.
"Meiryo" has too big internal leading for supporting accent marks of Western languages. This causes increasing normal line height than other fonts. Additionally, Gecko's normal line height computation is not same as the other browsers. Therefore, this may cause compatibility issue with the other browsers. For example, our <input> allows to scroll its content. Therefore, if user drags text in <input> vertically, the text may be scrolled [4].
If we could use "Yu Gothic" as Japanese default font, it'd be really nicer except compatibility with the other browsers because it has nicer glyph than "Meiryo" ("Meiryo" was designed for UI, not for document. Therefore, it was designed as easier to read even if the font size is small) and does not have too big leading like "Meiryo". However, there is a big problem. Text renderer of Windows has a bug. Text of "Yu Gothic" is rendered as too light [5]. So, the contrast between text and background color may not be enough for some users. Therefore, currently, we use "Yu Gothic" as a fallback font only when "Meiryo" isn't available.
Anyway, I believe that this makes 57 look nicer for Japanese users!
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548311 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1354004 [3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1351332 [4] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1378065 [5] https://bug548311.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=8848439
Thanks for bringing this up, Tom. In Tor Browser, we do currently whitelist Meiryo and Yu Gothic UI, but not Yu Mincho or Yu Gothic. I created a ticket to track this issue: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/23317
Arthur
On Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 2:13 PM, Tom Ritter tom@mozilla.com wrote:
Some input on Asian font preferences we could consider.
-tom ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Masayuki Nakano" masayuki@d-toybox.com Date: Aug 23, 2017 12:20 AM Subject: Intent to ship: Changing default Japanese fonts to modern fonts To: dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org Cc:
Hi,
We decided that we should change our default Japanese fonts from legacy "MS PGothic" (sans-serif) and "MS PMincho" (serif) which have bitmap glyph to modern "Meiryo" or "Yu Gothic" (sans-serif) and "Yu Mincho" (serif).
This has been enabled on Nightly and early Beta since 55 [1].
Then, I removed the |#ifdef EARLY_BETA_OR_EARLIER| in Nightly yesterday [2]. I.e., the new default settings are enabled on release build starting from 57.
I'd like to introduce some backgrounds:
"Meiryo" is installed on Vista or later (but not installed on Win10 unless you add Japanese in system language settings). "Yu Gothic" and "Yu Mincho" is installed on Win8.1 or later.
Both Edge and Chrome already started to use "Meiryo" as their default Japanese fonts. So, using "Meiryo" improves the compatibility between browsers and just looks better and is easier to read than bitmap glyph.
One of the reason why we didn't use "Meiryo" as default fonts is, "Meiryo" has normal style glyph as italic style glyph. E.g., |a<i>b</i>c| looks like |abc|, not |a/b/c|. The other browsers have this issue, but I see many users who complain about this issue. For solving this issue, we added a hack to ignore italic style family of "Meiryo" at loading fonts [3]. So, now, Gecko is the only one engine which supports italic style Japanese text with default fonts!
On the other hand, there are still some problems.
"Meiryo" has too big internal leading for supporting accent marks of Western languages. This causes increasing normal line height than other fonts. Additionally, Gecko's normal line height computation is not same as the other browsers. Therefore, this may cause compatibility issue with the other browsers. For example, our <input> allows to scroll its content. Therefore, if user drags text in <input> vertically, the text may be scrolled [4].
If we could use "Yu Gothic" as Japanese default font, it'd be really nicer except compatibility with the other browsers because it has nicer glyph than "Meiryo" ("Meiryo" was designed for UI, not for document. Therefore, it was designed as easier to read even if the font size is small) and does not have too big leading like "Meiryo". However, there is a big problem. Text renderer of Windows has a bug. Text of "Yu Gothic" is rendered as too light [5]. So, the contrast between text and background color may not be enough for some users. Therefore, currently, we use "Yu Gothic" as a fallback font only when "Meiryo" isn't available.
Anyway, I believe that this makes 57 look nicer for Japanese users!
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548311 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1354004 [3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1351332 [4] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1378065 [5] https://bug548311.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=8848439
-- Masayuki Nakano masayuki@d-toybox.com Software Engineer, Mozilla _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
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Arthur D. Edelstein -
Tom Ritter