Cannot change font for UTF-8 pages in FF 4.0.1
No matter whether I change Options > Content > Default font, or go to Options > Content > Advanced and set Sans Serif for Other Languages, nothing changes—for instance, on this forum. Everything's still Times New Roman from the looks of it.
The Sans Serif font for Other Languages is set to Arial.
There's no Unicode entry in the list. The Other Languages is the closest I could find.
I have Options > Content > Advanced > Allow pages to choose their own fonts… unchecked.
I made similar changes for Western, and that worked—for pages detected as having ISO-8859-1 encoding.
Is this a bug? Or am I doing something wrong?
<rant> On a more general note, I think that the font setup in Firefox is so over-complicated. I personally want all my pages in a single font, and I don't care if some weird languages are displayed incorrectly with it. I bet that most people do want the same, even them who speak those weird languages. It's just a matter of picking one font that works for the languages you care about.
Now that might not work perfectly for everybody so there should be an advanced option—an ability to add overrides. It should be similar to how it works now but the list of overrides should be user-customizable and empty by default. So that we regular people don't bother ourselves with encodings and languages we're never going to use.
I wonder if I'm the only one who's disappointed with FF's font settings. Couldn't find anything on this topic on the 'net. </rant>
Modified by drillster
All Replies (14)
Try setting it up the way you see it in the screenshots. In the first one, you have to set "Auto detect" to (Off). Hit the ALT key to get the text links on top.
The second screenshot shows my own particular settings.
In your second screenshot, I have that unchecked, too—see my original post.
In the first screenshot, I have it off already. But that only helps if the page does not specify encoding at all. For pages that do, the encoding is set to whatever the page specifies nevertheless.
So if the page is Western, it shows with the fonts I specified for Western. If it's UTF-8 like this forum, it is displayed with Times no matter what I do.
Are you opening the en-US locale on this website?
Xircal: this does not seem to be the case. When I go to Options > Content > Advanced > Other Languages I can see that Proportional is set to Sans Serif, and that Sans-Serif is set to Arial. The following line is also in my about:config:
font.default.x-unicode user set string sans-serif
cor-el: yes this is the address. While on this page, if I go to View > Character Encoding, the active selection is Unicode (UTF-8).
Edit: if I manually change this site's encoding to Western (ISO-8859-1) the font changes to that I specified for Western encoding in Advanced font options.
Modified by drillster
Firefox uses the font setting for Western unless a page uses a different encoding (More Encodings). UTF-8 doesn't trigger such a change and Firefox should still use the default font for Western.
You do need to disable website fonts if you want Firefox to use a specific font.
- Tools > Options > Content : Fonts & Colors > Advanced : [ ] "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above"
cor-el: see my original post. I had this option disabled from the very beginning:
- I have Options > Content > Advanced > Allow pages to choose their own fonts… unchecked.
When I switch between UTF-8 and Western in View > Character Encoding the page font changes nevertheless.
Create a new profile as a test to check if your current profile is causing the problems.
See:
If that new profile works then you can transfer some files from the old profile to that new profile (be careful not to copy corrupted files)
See:
cor-el: no it wasn't my profile. It was my Russian Windows. There, UTF-8 defaulted to Cyrillic.
I repeat my rant from the first post. Font management in Firefox is broken. I wouldn't have these problems if there was only one font setting.
In such cases you need to make the change to the Cyrillic font setting in Firefox.
You can open the about:config page via the location bar and do a search for cyrillic via the Filter at the top of that page to see all cyrillic related prefs.
See, you cannot even tell which option I should change to make UTF-8 pages look right—not without knowing my Windows locale settings. And there are more than 30 option pages hidden behind an Advanced button for me to guess. This is bad UI. I hope I made this point clear. I also hope that somebody responsible for Firefox design reads this eventually.
Did you try to change the font.name.serif.x-cyrillic and font.name.sans-serif.x-cyrillic pref to use another font?
Yes I did. It worked. I actually didn't need to use about:config for that: these settings were available under Fonts & Colors > Advanced > Cyrillic.
Yes, that is another way to do it.
The about:config page is useful as you can see all changes at once.