6

After upgrading Firefox to version 57 on my Ubuntu (16.04 LTS) Linux system, the browser will no longer display the Arial font. It simply discards all characters except international ones (such as ø). Other fonts work fine, and Firefox did not have this problem before I upgraded it.

Firefox 57 does not have this problem on my Windows and Mac computers, so I suppose it must be a problem with my Linux installation.

Any suggestions about how I can debug this? Where does Firefox find the Arial font in an Ubuntu Linux system? Or is it, perhaps, a bug in Firefox?

EDIT:

This web page uses Arial, and this question looks like this in Firefox:

enter image description here

Nemo
  • 1,134
  • 3
  • 12
  • 31
oz1cz
  • 167
  • 1
  • 10
  • Sounds like its font substitution engine is broken. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Nov 17 '17 at 16:48
  • 1
    Today I added this to the Firefox bug site. It turns out that I'm not the only one having this type of problem, although the bug seems to target different fonts on different computers. (My bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1418607. Similar bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1418618) – oz1cz Nov 18 '17 at 17:08
  • Writing this from fedora 26 using ff57 and its fine. Seems to be Ubuntu specific. Good on you to report the bug though. – gilgwath Nov 18 '17 at 18:55
  • 2
    I've found that if I go in to settings and uncheck the box that allows website to choose their own fonts then I can at least see all content. I wrote a [blog post](http://alicious.com/firefox-57-font-missing/) about it if that helps. – pbhj Nov 18 '17 at 21:33
  • Thanks for the link to your blog, pbhj. Installing Segoe UI didn’t work for me. But instead I installed Arial from a Windows distribution I have. That worked! – oz1cz Nov 18 '17 at 22:08

1 Answers1

0

Answering my own question:

This appears to be a bug in Firefox 57. A number of bug reports have been filed, so, hopefully, the problem will disappear in a future release.

Until then, the problem can be solved by copying a TTF file with the missing font (for example, Arial.ttf) from a Windows distribution to ~/.local/share/fonts. (Assuming, of course, that you have the necessary Windows license.)

oz1cz
  • 167
  • 1
  • 10