Bug#627039: chromium chooses a very poor font for Japanese text

[Miles Bader]

Package: chromium
Version: 11.0.696.65~r84435-1
Severity: normal


Recently (basically following the most recent upgrade, to version 11)
chromium has started using a poor font for rendering Japanese text -- it
uses the "kanjistrokeorders" font, which is not really designed for
normal text display (and as a result, tends to be somewhat hard to read).

I don't really understand how default fonts get chosen for the system in
general (some fontconfig setting?), but no other app seems to choose
this font; I have a bunch of Japanese fonts installed, and most of them
would be a better choice than the kanjistrokeorders font.

[Ideally it would be nice to allow per-language font customization --
chromium only seems to allow setting a single default font, which in
most cases won't be appropriate for CJK text (FF, for instance, allows
per-language font settings).]

Thanks,

-Miles


-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (50, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.38-2-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages chromium depends on:
ii  chromium-inspect 11.0.696.65~r84435-1    page inspector for the chromium br
ii  libasound2       1.0.23-4                shared library for ALSA applicatio
ii  libbz2-1.0       1.0.5-6                 high-quality block-sorting file co
ii  libc6            2.13-4                  Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libcairo2        1.10.2-6                The Cairo 2D vector graphics libra
ii  libcups2         1.4.6-5                 Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - 
ii  libdbus-1-3      1.4.8-3                 simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2 0.92-1                  simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libevent-1.4-2   1.4.13-stable-1         An asynchronous event notification
ii  libexpat1        2.0.1-7                 XML parsing C library - runtime li
ii  libfontconfig1   2.8.0-2.2               generic font configuration library
ii  libfreetype6     2.4.4-1                 FreeType 2 font engine, shared lib
ii  libgcc1          1:4.6.0-7               GCC support library
ii  libgconf2-4      2.32.1-1                GNOME configuration database syste
ii  libgcrypt11      1.4.6-5                 LGPL Crypto library - runtime libr
ii  libgdk-pixbuf2.0 2.23.3-3                GDK Pixbuf library
ii  libglib2.0-0     2.28.6-1                The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgtk2.0-0      2.24.4-3                The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  libjpeg62        6b1-1                   The Independent JPEG Group's JPEG 
ii  libnspr4-0d      4.8.7-2                 NetScape Portable Runtime Library
ii  libnss3-1d       3.12.9.with.ckbi.1.82-1 Network Security Service libraries
ii  libpam0g         1.1.2-3                 Pluggable Authentication Modules l
ii  libpango1.0-0    1.28.3-6                Layout and rendering of internatio
ii  libpng12-0       1.2.44-2                PNG library - runtime
ii  libspeex1        1.2~rc1-1               The Speex codec runtime library
ii  libstdc++6       4.6.0-7                 The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii  libvpx0          0.9.6-1                 VP8 video codec (shared library)
ii  libx11-6         2:1.4.3-1               X11 client-side library
ii  libxdamage1      1:1.1.3-1               X11 damaged region extension libra
ii  libxext6         2:1.3.0-1               X11 miscellaneous extension librar
ii  libxml2          2.7.8.dfsg-2+b1         GNOME XML library
ii  libxrender1      1:0.9.6-1               X Rendering Extension client libra
ii  libxslt1.1       1.1.26-7+b1             XSLT 1.0 processing library - runt
ii  libxss1          1:1.2.1-1               X11 Screen Saver extension library
ii  libxtst6         2:1.2.0-1               X11 Testing -- Record extension li
ii  xdg-utils        1.1.0~rc1-2             desktop integration utilities from
ii  zlib1g           1:1.2.5.dfsg-1          compression library - runtime

chromium recommends no packages.

Versions of packages chromium suggests:
pn  chromium-l10n                 <none>     (no description available)

-- no debconf information