[Pkg-chromium-maint] Bug#580910: chromium-browser: Fonts default to Times New Roman, Arial, and sans; should use system font settings, or Serif, Sans, and Monospace

Sun Jun 27 12:54:10 UTC 2010

Hi Josh,

Josh Triplett wrote:

> Chromium's fonts default to using Times New Roman for serif, Arial for
> sans, and for some reason sans for fixed-width fonts.  Ideally, Chromium
> should respect the system font settings from the user's environment
> (those set in GNOME's appearance properties, for instance).  In lieu of
> that, Chromium should at least default to Serif, Sans, and Monospace.

I agree with the principle, though I suspect something more complicated
is going on.

 . Under “Personal Stuff”, I have enabled the Gtk theme
 . Under Under the hood → Fonts and Encoding, I see:

    Font
     Serif font:       [   sans    ] [16]
     Sans-serif font:  [   sans    ] [16]
     Fixed-width font: [   sans    ] [13]
    Encoding
     Default encoding: [Unicode (UTF-8) ]
 . If I load this sample HTML document:

	<!doctype html>
	<html><title>sample page</title>
	<body>
	<p><tt>-------</tt>
	<p><tt>testing</tt>
	</body>
	</html>

    it really does appear to be using “Monospace”.
 . Now suppose I try changing “Fonts and encoding”.  I change the Fixed-width
   font to “Sans” (notice the capitalization!) and it changes to sans-serif.
   I change it to “Monospace” and it goes back again.

Could you file one or two bugs upstream[1] requesting

 - that Chromium use the Gtk standard fonts if possible

 - a facility for downstream distributors to easily set the default
   fonts according to distro policy

 - that the upstream default fonts at least make the fixed-width font
   have some fixed-width name

?  I only ask because I suspect your report would make more sense than
the nonsense I could write.

Thanks.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/entry?template=Defect%20on%20Linux