Some fonts not displaying correctly since recent update
After an update couple of weeks ago, fonts on some sites and in some emails started defaulting to the "Last Resort" system font.
The same sites and emails open correctly in Chrome. From what I can tell, the affected fonts are all stylized (bold, scaled larger than the surrounding type or emoticons).
I made sure my Firefox fonts default to Arial, Courier and Times New Roman, with "Allow pages to choose their own fonts..." selected. When I deselect this option, the fonts in the content display correctly but the site navigation fonts turn to "Last Resort." (I tried to upload screen grabs of everything, but got a spinning wheel.)
Thanks.
Krejt Përgjigjet (6)
This could be related with the recent switch in Firefox 52+ from Cairo to Skia for canvas/content rendering.
Firefox 52+ has changed from Cairo to Skia for canvas/content rendering.
- https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/52.0/releasenotes/
- When not using Direct2D on Windows, Skia is used for content rendering
You can modify these gfx.*.azure.backends prefs on the about:config page to revert to the old font rendering swap the skia,cairo order to cairo,skia or remove the skia and leave cairo.
- gfx.canvas.azure.backends = direct2d1.1,cairo,skia
- gfx.content.azure.backends = direct2d1.1,cairo,skia
You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar.
You can accept the warning and click "I'll be careful" to continue.
Thanks, cor-el! I'm new to this and want to be sure I don't screw things up:
I'm on a Mac, and when I go to modify the prefs, I get a window that says "Enter string value" and the only editable text there now is skia.
So do I use the full string you have above that starts with direct2d1.1, or should I enter just cairo,skia because I'm not on Windows?
On Mac you won't see direct2d1.1 (that is Windows only, so sorry about the confusion).
If you have skia,cairo or only skia on Mac then change that to cairo,skia
I thought this was working, but just had another page load with only "Last Resort" loaded, and again, the same page loads fine with correct fonts in Chrome.
Sad, because I don't like Chrome.
Maybe check for font issues in Font Book and also do a font test.
You can do a font test to see if you can identify corrupted font(s).
The problem started happening in application menus yesterday—I couldn't read the menu bar in Photoshop—so clearly not a Firefox problem!
So today I ran FontNuke, and so far, so good.
Thanks for all your help, though—it was all good advice and now I know how to troubleshoot much better than I did before.