Re: Bitstream Vera Sans render problem with GTK apps (Firefox, KDE OK)

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 13:16 -0500, Jim Gettys wrote:
> Ubuntu breezy is the first linux distribution to ship the latest Pango,
> which has a different rendering backend, and may be also be kerning for the
> first time.
> 
> Owen, Keith, help me out here... Is this likely to be a Vera bug, or a
> Pango/cairo bug?  I suspect Vera, but I suspect you're in the best
> position to make the call.

Kerning is enabled both in the latest Pango and in older Pango.

It is unlikely to be a Pango problem, though that's not *completely* 
impossible. Some rounding error in glyph positioning could theoretically
have been introduced, though the error there looks large.

It's more likely to be a problem with either FreeType (the version
of FreeType 2 isn't mentioned in the mail) or with with the font.

It would really have to be debugged by someone working with that
software stack, such as the people at Ubuntu.

I don't really know how FreeType kerning interacts with the bytecode
hinting ... it's probably something in that area.

Regards,
						Owen

> On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 04:45 -0500, Jim Lyles wrote:
> > Looks to me as if some sort of optical kerning has been enabled.
> > Observe the To and Ta pairs as well.
> > I don't recall there being a Fi kern pair in Vera; there is most
> > certainly To and Ta, but the amount of
> > kern appears to be too much, particularly at this small size.
> > 
> > -Jim
> > 
> > 
> > Eric Butler wrote: 
> > > Hi everyone, the following screenshot demonstrates my problem:
> > > 
> > > http://eric.extremeboredom.net/images/screenshots/vera-sans-problem1.png
> > > 
> > > Note the "File" menu. Firefox renders this properly, but epiphany
> > > (which is a native GTK application obviously, I have this problem with
> > > any GTK app) doesn't leave enough space between the "F" and the "i".
> > > This is the most obvious way to demo the problem, but other characters
> > > are having trouble as well.
> > > 
> > > My "Application Font" is "Bitstream Vera Sans Roman" size 8.
> > > 
> > > I am using Ubuntu Breezy with the following version information:
> > > 
> > > libttf2 1.4pre.20030402-1.1
> > > libxft2 2.1.7-1ubuntu5
> > > fontconfig 2.3.2-1ubuntu4
> > > 
> > > Native hinting and subpixel rendering are both enabled.
> >