Comment 9 for bug 608823

Comments from my Colleague Malcolm Wooden.

This bug concerns the wide spacing between the N - o in the Firefox screenshot now.png attached. This persons screen resolution is 120dpi and is using Ubuntu 8.04. The nearest I could get to duplicating this in Firefox on my Ubuntu system is shown on the screenshot DM_now.png. the system info on the ubuntu system I have is:
Rendered in Ubuntu Beta by Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100916 Ubuntu/10.10 (maverick) Firefox/3.6.10
This is using the latest release of the Ubuntu Regular font. There does not appear to be the same spacing problems as is shown in now.png.

It seems that Firefox does not use the rasteriser display setting from the systems 'Appearence Preferences' but uses it own configuration file for controlling the rasterising of fonts. It looks like the DM_now.png file is using no RGB subpixeling and only minimal hinting. It also seems that if the user has enough knowledge of the Ubuntu system and the Firefox installation they can change the configuration file used by Firefox if they so wish.

The nearest I could get to the now.png image is the From_gedit.png screenshot. This is using the Ubuntu text editor Gedit with the system Appearance Prefs set to Subpixel RGB and Full Hinting. Again there does not seem to be the same problem with the spacing as in now.png

Many of these spacing glitches are outside our control when Users and Applications can make changes to the basic setting of the font rasteriser.