Bug 201542 – [FreeType] Scrambled fonts

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: WORKSFORME
• Component: WebKitGTK

[Peter]

Created attachment 378176 [details]
lufthansa.com

Hello!

Since Epiphany 3.32.x/WebKit2Gtk 2.24.x - maybe a later release - the fonts get sometimes scrambled in a tab, this means the renderer mixes randomly sans-serif, serif and monospace letters within single words inside a HTML container. It happens mostly after using one tab for a while, jumping forward and backward and moving between sites.

Steps to reproduce (fasted way I figured out):
1.) Open Epiphany  
2.) Open a tab  
3.) Open URL "lufthansa.com" and repeat until scrambled fonts appear: {
  3.1) Use search for random destinations and go always backward *Ctrl+←* // it should be enough to do this five to ten times
}

It that a possible memory corruption?
This happened on my own website with Lychee (marked affected area in red on screenshot), lufthansa.com (marked affected area in red on screenshot) and heise.de. It seems that always another container (div, span or paragraph) is affected. So don't expect that the problem shows up at the very same part of the website, which I marked in my screenshots.

I'm using a ThinkPad X220 (CPU: i7-2640M, GPU: HD3000) with Archlinux.
Thank you

Previously reported:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/epiphany/issues/909#note_596855

[Peter]

Created attachment 378177 [details]
lychee on own website

[Peter]

Created attachment 378178 [details]
pacman -Q

[Cédric Bellegarde]

Only happens on ArchLinux for me...

Never happened on Fedora 30 (ok, older libs) and Fedora 31 (strange, same libs version than ArchLinux)

Changing zoom level fixe the issue until you come back to initial zoom level.

[Adrian Perez]

I saw something that looks to be exactly this same issue with
2.26.1 as packaged in Arch Linux this week, but just a couple
of times browsing Wikipedia—it hadn't happened to me before,
nor with trunk. Using back/forward navigation seems to make
the issue a tad easier to reproduce, indeed. 

In my case the GPU is an Intel HD Graphics 520 (Skylake),
running GNOME Shell on X11 with the “modesetting” driver
and Mesa 19.2.0. Interestingly enough, using Budgie (X11,
too) or Sway (a Wayland compositor) I haven't seen this
happen yet (but can't say it surely won't).

This seems one of those really difficult issues to pinpoint,
unfortunately.

[Peter]

This doesn't occour for some time on Archlinux. I cannot say what fixed it, but the issue has been gone. Should we close?

[Adrian Perez]

(In reply to Peter from comment #5)
> This doesn't occour for some time on Archlinux. I cannot say what fixed it,
> but the issue has been gone. Should we close?

Same here, probably it was some Fontconfig/Freetype issue which got fixed
at some point as distro packages were updated. Let's close the bug for now,
we can always reopen it later if needed :)