Ugly Text
 

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 4:46 PM, Jonathan Ryshpan <jonrysh@pacbell.net> wrote:
> Text to be printed by Firefox has disastrously bad text layout, and has
> had bad layout for years. *An example is attached. *The only way to get
> text well laid out is to copy it into a word processor (I use Open
> Office) and to print it out from there.
>
> Who else has noticed this? *Is there a known cure, say by downloading
> fonts, or font layout tables?

You've hit it.. It's often missing fonts that cause bad rendering.
There are some web core font packages you can install that will
improve it. You can also override the web page settings.
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Ugly Text
 

There are some font packages that start with ttf (if I remember correctly) that fix this problem cleanly.

On Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:33:47 -0400
Kwan Lowe <kwan@digitalhermit.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 4:46 PM, Jonathan Ryshpan <jonrysh@pacbell.net> wrote:
> > Text to be printed by Firefox has disastrously bad text layout, and has
> > had bad layout for years. *An example is attached. *The only way to get
> > text well laid out is to copy it into a word processor (I use Open
> > Office) and to print it out from there.
> >
> > Who else has noticed this? *Is there a known cure, say by downloading
> > fonts, or font layout tables?
>
> You've hit it.. It's often missing fonts that cause bad rendering.
> There are some web core font packages you can install that will
> improve it. You can also override the web page settings.
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Ugly Text
 

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 01:46:02PM -0700, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
> Text to be printed by Firefox has disastrously bad text layout, and has
> had bad layout for years. An example is attached. The only way to get
> text well laid out is to copy it into a word processor (I use Open
> Office) and to print it out from there.
>
> Who else has noticed this? Is there a known cure, say by downloading
> fonts, or font layout tables?
>
> Thanks - jon
>
Having not yet viewed your attached images, I need to ask: is it ugly
characters/symbols, or is it the horrid layout?

I have this ongoing pet peeve with firefox in which it will take a
web page that looks one way, and re-renders it horribly for layout
on the printer. often a page that fits compactly on the screen will
come out of the printer as 3 separate pages with stuff spread out
vertically that was in "parallel" on the screen.


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Ugly Text
 

On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 22:04 +0100, Frank Murphy wrote:
> On 11/08/10 21:46, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
> > Text to be printed by Firefox has disastrously bad text layout, and has
> > had bad layout for years. An example is attached. The only way to get
> > text well laid out is to copy it into a word processor (I use Open
> > Office) and to print it out from there.
> >
> > Who else has noticed this? Is there a known cure, say by downloading
> > fonts, or font layout tables?

> You have not provided a link?

Quite right. Sorry. The link is:
http://www.tnr.com/print/article/politics/76822/the-look-time


On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 16:54 -0400, Paul Cartwright wrote:
> just curious, why would you want to print a web page?
> I usually copy & paste any web page info to a word processor, and save it as a
> text file, or just print then delete.. That saves printing all the stupid
> ads, etc, on the web page. Or am I missing something?

Often the page doesn't have any such garbage on it, like the one linked
to above.


On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 14:01 -0700, JD wrote:
> Perhaps (I conjecture here) that the web page being
> viewed was created using Microsoft web tools
> which use features or attributes in the resulting web
> content, that FF simply does not know what to do with
> or implements them incorrectly.
>
> Perhaps MS is highjacking the web page standards in
> the same way they had tried to highjack java.

Probably not. The page linked to is from The New Republic. I have
similar problems printing from the NY Times.


On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 17:33 -0400, Kwan Lowe wrote:
> You've hit it.. It's often missing fonts that cause bad rendering.
> There are some web core font packages you can install that will
> improve it. You can also override the web page settings.

Are these the ttf.. packages mentioned below by JB?


On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 17:06 -0500, Jonathan Beatty wrote:
> There are some font packages that start with ttf (if I remember
> correctly) that fix this problem cleanly.

No useful looking packages starting ttf. Here's a list of all packages
with ttf in their names:
SDL_ttf.i686
SDL_ttf.x86_64
SDL_ttf-debuginfo.x86_64
SDL_ttf-devel.i686
SDL_ttf-devel.x86_64
baekmuk-ttf-dotum-fonts.noarch
baekmuk-ttf-fonts-common.noarch
baekmuk-ttf-fonts-ghostscript.noarch
baekmuk-ttf-gulim-fonts.noarch
baekmuk-ttf-hline-fonts.noarch
batik-ttf2svg.noarch
brettfont-fonts.noarch
perl-Font-TTF.noarch
scottfree.x86_64
ttf2pt1.x86_64
ttf2pt1-debuginfo.x86_64
Which do you think are the ones wanted?

On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 20:14 -0400, fred smith wrote:
> Having not yet viewed your attached images, I need to ask: is it ugly
> characters/symbols, or is it the horrid layout?

It's horrid layout.

Thanks to all - jon



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Ugly Text
 

Ah, go ahead and ask in #fedora. They know the exact package names; I
had this problem for the first fifteen minutes. They're font packages.
Try searching for tahoma.

On 8/11/10, Jonathan Ryshpan <jonrysh@pacbell.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 22:04 +0100, Frank Murphy wrote:
>> On 11/08/10 21:46, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
>> > Text to be printed by Firefox has disastrously bad text layout, and has
>> > had bad layout for years. An example is attached. The only way to get
>> > text well laid out is to copy it into a word processor (I use Open
>> > Office) and to print it out from there.
>> >
>> > Who else has noticed this? Is there a known cure, say by downloading
>> > fonts, or font layout tables?
>
>> You have not provided a link?
>
> Quite right. Sorry. The link is:
> http://www.tnr.com/print/article/politics/76822/the-look-time
>
>
> On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 16:54 -0400, Paul Cartwright wrote:
>> just curious, why would you want to print a web page?
>> I usually copy & paste any web page info to a word processor, and save it
>> as a
>> text file, or just print then delete.. That saves printing all the stupid
>> ads, etc, on the web page. Or am I missing something?
>
> Often the page doesn't have any such garbage on it, like the one linked
> to above.
>
>
> On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 14:01 -0700, JD wrote:
>> Perhaps (I conjecture here) that the web page being
>> viewed was created using Microsoft web tools
>> which use features or attributes in the resulting web
>> content, that FF simply does not know what to do with
>> or implements them incorrectly.
>>
>> Perhaps MS is highjacking the web page standards in
>> the same way they had tried to highjack java.
>
> Probably not. The page linked to is from The New Republic. I have
> similar problems printing from the NY Times.
>
>
> On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 17:33 -0400, Kwan Lowe wrote:
>> You've hit it.. It's often missing fonts that cause bad rendering.
>> There are some web core font packages you can install that will
>> improve it. You can also override the web page settings.
>
> Are these the ttf.. packages mentioned below by JB?
>
>
> On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 17:06 -0500, Jonathan Beatty wrote:
>> There are some font packages that start with ttf (if I remember
>> correctly) that fix this problem cleanly.
>
> No useful looking packages starting ttf. Here's a list of all packages
> with ttf in their names:
> SDL_ttf.i686
> SDL_ttf.x86_64
> SDL_ttf-debuginfo.x86_64
> SDL_ttf-devel.i686
> SDL_ttf-devel.x86_64
> baekmuk-ttf-dotum-fonts.noarch
> baekmuk-ttf-fonts-common.noarch
> baekmuk-ttf-fonts-ghostscript.noarch
> baekmuk-ttf-gulim-fonts.noarch
> baekmuk-ttf-hline-fonts.noarch
> batik-ttf2svg.noarch
> brettfont-fonts.noarch
> perl-Font-TTF.noarch
> scottfree.x86_64
> ttf2pt1.x86_64
> ttf2pt1-debuginfo.x86_64
> Which do you think are the ones wanted?
>
> On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 20:14 -0400, fred smith wrote:
>> Having not yet viewed your attached images, I need to ask: is it ugly
>> characters/symbols, or is it the horrid layout?
>
> It's horrid layout.
>
> Thanks to all - jon
>
>
>
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Ugly Text
 

On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 13:46 -0700, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
> Text to be printed by Firefox has disastrously bad text layout, and has
> had bad layout for years. An example is attached. The only way to get
> text well laid out is to copy it into a word processor (I use Open
> Office) and to print it out from there.

I can't say that I've noticed it being that terrible. Most browsers are
rather poor at printing, and Firefox actually seemed a bit better. Of
course it doesn't help that most pages were constructed for some stupid
fixed layout on the screen, that doesn't really translate to paper
(portrait versus landscape orientation, etc.).

Usually, there's two problems:

1. The author is trying to specify a layout like a magazine using a
technology (HTML) that's not meant for it. And often, choosing a layout
that looks like a 9 year old designed it. Not to mention that the page
is often constructed with badly broken HTML.

2. The author is specifying fonts that you do not have, and your system
is using poor substitutions.

Fixing the first problem tends to involve doing what you've done (use
something else to fix up the page). Fixing the second one can be as
simple as installing more fonts. I've tried installing the Microsoft
fonts, in the past, and that hasn't always been a good idea. Some of
them just look bad.

More recently, I went with installing the Liberation fonts. They're
designed as replacements for the Microsoft fonts, having the same
metrics as them (so they fit the space), but not being identical in
looks (so they don't look crap).

That tends to make most pages look good. Or, at least, better, since
the fonts designed for low resolution screens are different than those
designed to look good on high resolution printers. Printing screen
fonts often looks like everything's been done in bold type.

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Ugly Text
 

On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 17:34 -0700, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
> The link is:
> http://www.tnr.com/print/article/politics/76822/the-look-time

That actually looks reasonably good, on screen, here. Though grey
writing on white background can be a printing headache, as printers have
to dither black ink to make grey, so you get fuzzy printing. But there
may be an option to always print text in full black.

The print preview looks a bit worse, mostly for being a bad font.
Inter-character spacing seems too much, inter-word spacing is too
little, and inter-line space being too little, as well. The first two
being quite noticeably different between the original webpage and
print-preview, with the line spacing being something that becomes really
noticeable because of the other two issues.

For a permanent solution, I'd be inclined to try the following:
Locate your userContent-example.css file (inside the .mozilla directory,
in your home space). Read it, and create a new userContent.css file in
the same place. Put some overrides in for print media to use a font
that you find easy to read. Then restart the browser to use your CSS.

e.g. Start off with the following, and customise it.

@media print {

/*
Most printers impose margins already; and some
browsers do, too. Stop even more margins
being added to them. And reset some other
parameters for all elements.
*/

html, body {
margin: 0 !important;
padding: 0 !important;
color: black !important;
background: white !important;
}


/* Set all text to be this font, by default. */

* {
font-family: liberation-serif !important;
}


/*
Set some elements to use a different font, if you want,
for various types of headings.
*/

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, th, caption, label, legend, dt
{font-family: liberation-sans !important;}

code, pre, tt {
font-family: monospace !important;
font-style: normal !important;
}


/*
Get rid of the underlining of links that you can't click on,
any more, because they're on paper.
*/

a {text-decoration: none !important;}

}

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Ugly Text
 

On Thu, 2010-08-12 at 11:32 +0930, Tim wrote:
> I can't say that I've noticed it being that terrible.

Well, not for a long time (several years)...

I do remember some rather stupid renderings, not dependent on font or
webpage.

e.g. 12'34" would print as 12 ' 34 "

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Ugly Text
 

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 9:31 PM, Tim <ignored_mailbox@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 17:34 -0700, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
>> The link is:
>> http://www.tnr.com/print/article/politics/76822/the-look-time
>
> That actually looks reasonably good, on screen, here. *Though grey
> writing on white background can be a printing headache, as printers have
> to dither black ink to make grey, so you get fuzzy printing. *But there
> may be an option to always print text in full black.

The page looks absolutely perfect here, both in the main Firefox
display and in Print Preview. That said, I do have the msttcore-fonts
package installed. Could the reason it looks like garbage for the OP
be simply that?

msttcore-fonts-2.0-3.noarch

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Ugly Text
 

On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 22:59 -0500, Christofer C. Bell wrote:
> I do have the msttcore-fonts package installed. Could the reason it
> looks like garbage for the OP be simply that?

Quite likely. In the absence of the requested font, the system will try
to find a replacement. That may be done by name matching, or you may
configure a list. Some automatically chosen replacements might look
bad, because they're not intended as a general body font (e.g. they're a
heading font), or their a bitmap at a different size.

Most fonts look good at certain sizes, but not so good when you go
beyond that, if you simply scale them up or down. Scaling bitmaps is
going to be awful.

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