[tbb-dev] Fwd: Intent to ship: Changing default Japanese fonts to modern fonts

[Arthur D. Edelstein]

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 at mozilla.com> wrote:
> Some input on Asian font preferences we could consider.
>
> -tom
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: "Masayuki Nakano" <masayuki at d-toybox.com>
> Date: Aug 23, 2017 12:20 AM
> Subject: Intent to ship: Changing default Japanese fonts to modern fonts
> To: <dev-platform at 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 at d-toybox.com>
> Software Engineer, Mozilla
> _______________________________________________
> dev-platform mailing list
> dev-platform at lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
>
> _______________________________________________
> tbb-dev mailing list
> tbb-dev at lists.torproject.org
> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tbb-dev
>