Mozilla pegs CPU and hangs on certain pages when Vera is used

[Tom Moertel <tom moertel com>]

Hi,

First, the Vera family of fonts is great.  It's now the default serif,
sans, and monospace on my RHL 8.0 system.  Which brings me to the
problem...

I have set Vera as the default serif, sans-serif, and monospace fonts in
Mozilla.  When visiting certain sites (e.g., the W3C home page
www.w3.org) while Vera is in use, Mozilla pegs the CPU and hangs in some
kind of infinite loop.  This doesn't happen when other fonts are in
use.  I've been able to replicate the behavior in both xft and gtk2
builds of Mozilla 1.3 and 1.4a.

I'm not familiar with Mozilla's font-handling code, so I don't know
whether it or Vera (or both or neither) is the cause.  Maybe Mozilla is
making some bad assumptions about metrics, or maybe Vera has same
pathological data in its tables.  Nevertheless, I am reporting the issue
here with the hope that you will find the information useful.

Cheers,
Tom