[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 77437] freetype port: font fallback mechanism can try harder

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77437

--- Comment #12 from Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro at igalia.com> ---
Epiphany sets the WebKit default to GNOME's default... by default.

Anyway, this bug only covers the case where no generic fallback (sans-serif) is in the font-family list. The case of font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; is bug #147057, where I am pretty sure we have agreed on a solution (though the discussion occurred before I filed that bug).

In the case where sans-serif is not in the list (this bug)... after processing the entire font-family list and finding no match, there are two possibilities for what we should do: (a) allow fontconfig to match on the first font, which might return a font that's better than the browser's default -- that's what the patch in this bug implements -- or (b) use the default font always.

I've been going back and forth on whether (a) is a good idea. Yesterday I thought "if there is no generic fallback listed, we might as well perform unrestricted fontconfig matching to try to find the best font." Today I think it's better to fix bug #147057 and leave it at that: never perform fontconfig matching except for fonts that are extremely similar to each other (strongly-aliased fonts), and use our default font otherwise. That would be sufficient to fix both of these particular issues, since Arial would get matched to Liberation Sans. So I am inclined to say WONTFIX for this bug, but I will leave that choice to Martin Robinson (although maybe Martin Jackson has an opinion on this too?).

Actually, there is one more thing we should change here: the lastResortFallbackFont should be sans. It seems we use serif currently, but that's silly, it should be sans. Bug #147088.

BTW the patch status was that the general idea was approved, but not the implementation (r- means "review denied"). Also, I think there needs to be layout tests for this, since they would be easy to write. We have a jhbuild environment for running tests to make sure that our font settings are always the same.

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