Bug 27315 – Helvetica Neue Bold Outline is given higher priority than Helvetica Neue Bold if both are installed and activated

• Status: UNCONFIRMED
• Component: Text

[Michael Tierney]

Created attachment 32805 [details]
Example of the issue

If a user has the font Helvetica Neue Bold Outline (also known as Helvetica 75 Bold Outline - normally, this is included in the Adobe Font Folio) installed and activated, the Bold Outline version is displayed when a website, using font-family: "Helvetica Neue" as part of the cascade, calls for the bold version of Helvetica Neue.

It appears that the way that Webkit is pulling in the fonts simply has the Bold Outline variant meeting its criteria first - the PostScript names I'm seeing are HelveticaNeue-BoldOutline and HelveticaNeue-Bold. 

This appears on any site that meets that criteria - in CSS the font-family cascade starts with "Helvetica Neue" and then at some point, an element is set to display as bold (either through wrapping that element in a <strong>/<b> tag or using the CSS to specifically target that element to be bold).  I've linked to Wilson Miner's website because his front page has a very prominent example of this.

You can see screenshots at:
http://panpainter.com/misc/webkit/helvetica-outline-issues.html

Always reproducible.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Install Helvetica Neue Bold Outline/Helvetica 75 Bold Outline
2. Activate Helvetica [Neue/75] Bold Outline
3. (Re)launch Webkit/Safari
4. Visit http://www.wilsonminer.com (or some other site known to use Helvetica Neue)

Actual Results:  
Bolded elements are displayed as outlined variation.

Expected Results:  
Bolded elements are displayed a bolded versions.

Prioritized Helvetica Neue Bold over Helvetica Neue 75 Bold Outline.  My theory is that if Helvetica Neue 75 were active, it might behave properly, but when a user attempts to activate that specific face, a warning is produced stating that there may be conflicts due to the two fonts have identical postscript names. In Mac OS X Helvetica Neue (the pre-installed font family) are not available for being disabled, since they're a system font.

There may be a CSS workaround, but any workaround that I can envision would be immensely cumbersome and difficult to maintai.

As far as I can tell, this is isolated to Mac OS X.

I'm using Adobe Font Folio 10, and the typefaces that I'm able to use to reproduce the error are Type 1 fonts.

Related, Jeffrey Zeldman has some observations on this issue as well: http://www.zeldman.com/2008/11/13/real-type-on-the-web/#comment-39578

[Michael Tierney]

Created attachment 32806 [details]
Specific font information

[Mark Rowe (bdash)]

<rdar://problem/7063069>