On Xservers missing the XRender extensions fonts were not displayed correctly. First noticed it with gtk+ linked against cairo but I proved it with a simple native cairo example (see URL). I explicitly tested with the same libs because I first suspected freetype to be the cause. Images looks like some mask is displaced. Tested it with Cairo 1.2.x and 1.3.4. Cairo 1.0.4 works using the same additional libraries. Used Solaris 8 and 9 for testing. Please see hardcopies at http://mrtg.net.hrz.tu-darmstadt.de/liebe/cairo/
I've tested with cairo-1.3.6, too. No changes. But I found out, that the problem only occurs when I set font smoothing to subpixel (LCD)/CAIRO_ANTIALIAS_SUBPIXEL. It works fine with both Grayscale and None.
I can no longer check the external link to confirm this bug - but the bug sounds quite insidious and I expect the behaviour to have changed with the oft-modified code in cairo-ft-font.c
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