[Pkg-fonts-devel] recent font weirdness

[Ming Hua]

On Fri, Mar 24, 2006 at 06:46:15AM +0100, Christian Perrier wrote:
> Quoting Paul Wise (pabs3 at bonedaddy.net):
> > 
> > I upgraded my sid install today, and I get a weird problem in galeon
> > (but not firefox) viewing planet debian, where the letter l partially
> > merges with the letter following it. Only font related packages I
> > upgraded recently are libxft2, ttf-freefont and ttf-alee, but
> > downgrading these does not help. Any ideas?
> 
> Well, I just had a very similar bug report for ttf-freefont....
> 
> The problem was a user with "s" and "t" overlapping in evolution.....
> 
> So, this definitely seems to not be in ttf-freefont itself.
> 
> You mentioning galeon makes me think that the weirdness could be more
> located in soem Gnome stuff.....

Hmm, maybe this is not a strict -devel list. :-)

Anyway, there has been bug reports about similar rendering glitches in
Ubuntu's ttf-dejavu fonts [1] as well.  The discussion on DejaVu
upstream mailing list [2] suggests this is due to a change in Pango [3],
but the Pango maintainers say this is actually a bug in the fonts, but
just exposed recently by the changes in Pango (to support some new
OpenType features which were ignored by previous versions of Pango), and
some DejaVu developers seem to agree.

I don't have any expertise to make an judgement, but seeing that
unstable recently upgraded Pango from 1.10.4 to 1.12.0 (the change in
Pango was at 1.11.1), and both Paul and Christian's bugs are GTK related
(not sure if Debian's firefox use Pango or not), I suspect they are the
same issue.

1. https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/ttf-dejavu/+bug/35470
2.  http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=10015103&forum_id=40874
3. http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=334758

Hope this helps,
Ming
2006.03.24