Saturday, June 15, 2013

Badfont goodbye

I am in British Columbia today, where the Dr Pepper has real sugar, not high fructose corn syrup (non-US readers: the bizarre sugar tariff situation in the USA means that HFCS-42/HFCS-55 is cheaper to use in most applications where sugar/sucrose would be, particularly in soft drinks, and IMHO there is a non-trivial taste difference). It is the closest thing left commercially available that in any way approaches the nirvana that was Dublin Dr Pepper (r.i.p.), so if you hear about someone busted for smuggling several cases of Dr Pepper into Washington state, that was me and please bail me out. Between Mexican Coke and Canadian Dr Pepper, I think Mr Pibb -- in the form of the inferior but still delightful Pibb Xtra -- is the only domestic beverage I still drink regularly.

While prepping patches in my hotel room to attack the summit that is Firefox 24 (I am gradually eliminating the "not implemented yet" stubs in my internal IonMonkey build, though I still can't test Baseline Compiler yet), I am purging old code from our changesets that no longer holds relevance. Most of this is for methodjit/JaegerMonkey, which of course no longer exists, but during the debugging of the Type 1 bitmap font issue definitively fixed in TenFourFox 17 I added the tenfourfox.gfx.badfont.* prefs to allow people to force fallbacks in place of Arial, Helvetica and Times if those fonts actually were Type 1 bitmaps which HarfBuzz, TenFourFox's sole font renderer, can't process. This should not be necessary anymore since TenFourFox will automatically filter such fonts now and I'd like to remove the prefs to eliminate the amount of code that needs to be merged. If someone absolutely still must use these prefs to render web pages, I would like to find a better solution for you, so please advise. They will be left in 17 through the end of 17ESR and will make their last appearance in the unstable branch 22, to be removed in 24ESR.

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