Adding font to OS changes font in several websites

FrankV

Running KDE on Arch Linux, Vivaldi 7.0.3495.23 stable installed from pacman.

As strange as it sounds, after installing a TTF font to my OS using the settings' font management, as such:

Now the font appears on Vivaldi, on several sites:

The font was literally only installed, and I did not touch any setting at all related to fonts:

And the strangest thing is that I have manually changed the font settings on Vivaldi, yet the issue persists:

What is going on? I know it could be as much an issue of Vivaldi and KDE/Arch, but I honestly don't know what to do. I'll be asking this as well on r/KDE to see if anyone has any clue over there.

mib2berlin

@FrankV
Hi, where do you get this font?
The default settings looks different on my KDE system:

FrankV

@mib2berlin

In a panic, I swapped those options from fallback to the closest things I had on my machine, but even after resetting the setting to its defaults, the font issue is still happening.

mib2berlin

@FrankV
Test this in a Guest Profile to check if it is a user profile or system issue.

FrankV

@mib2berlin

It is happening on a Guest Profile, on a second profile, and I actually tested it on Firefox, and it's also happening there.

It's probably some global setting that's not shown on the KDE font menu that's affecting browsers (and maybe even more that I just haven't noticed).

DoctorG

@FrankV Can you please check:
fc-match "Alien League"

Could be a font alias is set in ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf
Font_configuration#Replace_or_set_default_fonts

Where did you download the TTF font file?

I checked on my Debian 12 KDE and could not find that Alien League was used as as a Sans font in Vivaldi.

Seems your font substitution on Arch is acting strange.

lfisk

@DoctorG said in Adding font to OS changes font in several websites:

I checked on my Debian 12 KDE and could not find that Alien League was used as as a Sans font in Vivaldi.

Guessing... Tools shows that Vivaldi.com web pages usually call for the "system-ui" font-family. Suspect that "Alien League" has taken over as the "system-ui" font or at least in the settings Vivaldi checks to see what to use

Vivaldi Browser _ Powerful, Personal and Private web browser.jpg

DoctorG

@lfisk said in Adding font to OS changes font in several websites:

Suspect that "Alien League" has taken over as the "system-ui" font

Then the Arch Linux has trouble with fontconfig.

I can not reproduce it on Debian 12 KDE+Cinnamon.

lfisk

@DoctorG I'm running Deb12 Gnome. This setting is likely buried in dconfig. Screenshot is from "dconf Editor" in my System Tools. I added this util some time ago.

This is also the font usually called up when selecting "Sans". It was originally "Cantarell" which I don't really care for...

FrankV

@DoctorG running fc-match "Alien League" returns ALIEN5.TTF: "Alien League" "Regular", which is a font that I downloaded probably from dafont.

Yesterday doing research, I found out that I just simply didn't have that ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf file in my system. I had to do touch fonts.conf, and it currently is empty, with still the same issue appearing on my browsers.

@lfisk I would like to know what exactly you inspected to get to that 'system-ui' font, because going to vivaldi:inspect/#apps to get the browser inspector, I checked and found these:

And if it is useful, this is the inspection of a Google search:

lfisk

@FrankV Go to the top left corner of this Forum and click on "Vivaldi". Loads the default page (Vivaldi.com). Now click on Tools in the web browser menu and click on Developer Tools (Shift+F12). Choose "Elements" at the top. You want to inspect the code from this web page and see what font is being asked for in the Styles css coding. You could try editing the "font-family" here by double clicking "system-ui" and deleting it (edit the line and then hit return), leaving just "sans-serif". See if the problem font on this page goes away. May give us a clue as to if this is where the problem is coming from...

Vivaldi(1).jpg

FrankV

@lfisk Thank you! Thanks to you, I have a breakthrough.

This is what the body style shows, and the page looks okay:

But if I do as you say and delete the system-ui font family, leaving only sans-serif, the font changes!

The font is no longer the Alien font because I have since installed more fonts (I need them for design projects), but now I see that sans-serif is for some reason what is getting attached to the other fonts. Not only that, but checking any google page and replacing any mention of sans-serif with system-ui fixes the font.

Strangly now is that even Arial is displaying the wrong font.

So not only has my custom fonts replaced sans-serif, but also Arial? Is my Arch config just that messed up?

lfisk

@FrankV You're out of my area of knowledge here...

How are you installing these other fonts. Using a package like deb, rpm, flatpak? Suspect the Distro you're running isn't aware of these in someway.

@DoctorG may have some ideas for what to do here...

lfisk

@FrankV Had another thought... If you haven't already, try changing Vivaldi Default fonts to actual ones, not just the Generic names as in your image above. Example of my settings:

FrankV

@lfisk I have installed my fonts by just copying them from a backup and dropping them in ~/.local/share/fonts/

In that pic, you can actually see the Alien font in the TTF folder.

And nope, changing the fonts (save for mono and fantasy cuz I dont have your fonts) to the same fonts you shared does nothing

FrankV

Update, I have discovered, using fc-list | grep arial, that the fonts that have been messing around my stuff are of the family Arial, and are actually the only ones that do so.

Running fc-match arial resulted in one of these three fonts being selected for some reason. Now that I've removed those fonts, fc-match arial at least gives something familiar:

NotoSerif-Regular.ttf: "Noto Serif" "Regular"

Now, this is just a matter of changing my fonts.conf settings to direct the arial family to the proper font.

And now Google looks right

Bottom line: Broken TTF fonts with incorrect family setup were being auto-selected to become the default font for Arial, overriding fonts.conf for some reason.

DoctorG

@FrankV What was shown before you changed font
configuration?
fc-match sans-serif