Firefox: Figuring out rendered FONTS

Behdad Esfahbod behdad at behdad.org
Sat Feb 9 05:50:42 UTC 2008


On Fri, 2008-02-08 at 21:28 -0400, Jorge Fábregas wrote:
> 
> font-family: calibri, tahoma, arial, sans-serif
> 
> That's cool, I don't have to dig into CSS files etc....However, I really have 
> no idea what font Firefox finally used to render the section. I'm not good at 
> identifying the subtle differences between similar fonts...so VISUAL 
> identification is out of the question :)   Is there a way to know this for 
> sure? Is there a way I could turn some debug mode in Firefox so that when it 
> is rendering a page it will give something like this:
> 
> REQUESTED FONT FOR THIS SECTION:
> font-family: calibri, tahoma, arial, sans-serif
> 
> ACTION:
> 1) calibri not available, tryng next...
> 2) tahoma not available, trying next...
> 3) arial FOUND ------> USING ARIAL
> 
> Am I asking too much ? :)

This for sure is not quite available.  FC_DEBUG=1 gives you some
stuff...  The thing is, the logic is happening inside fontconfig, and is
not as simple as you want it to be.  Font configuration files can (and
do) alter the obvious lookups you mention above.  What may be useful is
running:

  $ fc-match calibri,tahoma,arial,sans-serif

but that ignore a lot of variants, like the language of the current run
of text.

-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little
 Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
        -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759




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