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TTF or OTF, bad behavior on upgraded systems



Hi all,

I was looking at the fonts page[1] on the wiki and it mentions:

"For most uses, you’ll want TrueType (TTF) and OpenType (OTF) fonts"

In fact, is it necessary to install both, or just OTF if the same font
is available as both?

On a system that has been upgraded from etch through several Debian
versions up to stretch, I found Firefox was behaving badly, especially
when printing pages containing Helvetica.  It is a little chunky on
screen but almost unreadable when rendered on the printer.

Can anything be done to make this easier for users who have upgraded?

Looking on the web page, I used "Inspect Element" to identify the font
(Helvetica)

and then I checked which font is used:

$ fc-match helvetica
helvR12-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz: "Helvetica" "Regular"

That is a bitmap font in xfonts-100dpi and xfonts-75dpi on my system.

I tried installing the OTF and TTF packages (which were missing) with:

apt install fonts-freefont-otf fonts-freefont-ttf

but that still didn't work.

Next I tried adding the MS fonts with

apt install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

and that didn't resolve it either, next I tried

sudo fc-cache -v

but it was still using the PCF bitmap font.

Finally, I saw the suggestion on the wiki to run:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig fontconfig-config

and that fixed the problem.

Can anything be done to make this easier for users who have upgraded?

Regards,

Daniel

1. https://wiki.debian.org/Fonts


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