On my second "sarge" box, which I *thought* was printing OK, I now find
on closer inspection that there are still some subtle errors in printing
the Debian homepage:
In the sidebar at the left, the boldface main headings are correctly
printed in sans-serif (quasi-Helvetica) face; but the individual items
below the headings are *printed* in a serif face much like Times. Most of
the underlines below these items are a little too short at the right end,
as if there were calculated from the metrics for a slightly narrower
font -- probably, the intended sans-serif one. (The underline deficit
looks as if it's about equal to the sum of the serif widths in the line.)
The main text of the page has heading set in serif font ("Times"-like)
on-screen, but are a sans-serif boldface on the printout. Similarly, the
links under "News" are in Times-Bold on the screen, but in Helvetica-bold
(or something similar) on the printout.
So the general rule seems to be: everything in bold on-screen is
Helvetica-bold on paper; everything in regular type on-screen is Roman
(serif) face on paper.
The spacing errors are present, but in a subtler form. There is a
tendency for the links in the text to be preceded by too *much* space
on the hard copy. But in the page footer, the links to debian-www and SPI
are shifted left so much that they slightly overlap the last glyph of the
previous text.
In the language list at the bottom of the page, all the non-Latin
characters print as little empty rectangles. This includes the second
glyph of "B*lgarski". All the words print correctly spaced on this
second machine (e.g., "Hangul" and "Nihongo"), though they were spaced
out on the first one. However, the wide-spacing seen previously occurs
*on-screen* here -- but *not* on paper.
All the non-Latin glyphs display correctly on-screen, but fail to print on
paper.
Clearly, the font-substitution mechanism is screwed up. Here's the
relevant section from prefs.js:
user_pref("font.minimum-size.x-western", 14);
user_pref("font.name.cursive.x-western", "Free Avant Garde");
user_pref("font.name.fantasy.x-western", "URW Chancery L");
user_pref("font.name.monospace.x-western", "Courier");
user_pref("font.name.sans-serif.x-western", "Helvetica");
user_pref("font.name.serif.x-western", "Times");
user_pref("font.size.fixed.x-western", 16);
user_pref("font.size.variable.x-western", 17);
It might be that the reason things *tend* to look OK on-screen but get
formatted badly on paper is that more fonts are available to the display
than to the PS printer; so you tend to get more nearly what you expect
on-screen than on paper. So I think the place to look for trouble is
probably in the font-substitution works of xprint and/or fontconfig
and/or defoma, not in mozilla itself.
Just my 2ยข worth.
-- Andy Young
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