Bug 8097 - "t" badly positioned in Serif in Fedora
Summary: "t" badly positioned in Serif in Fedora
Status: RESOLVED INVALID
Alias: None
Product: DejaVu
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Serif (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: x86 (IA32) Linux (All)
: high normal
Assignee: Deja Vu bugs
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2006-09-01 04:44 UTC by Tom Horsley
Modified: 2007-02-03 14:50 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

See Also:
i915 platform:
i915 features:


Attachments
xmag screenshot (3.67 KB, image/png)
2006-09-01 04:45 UTC, Tom Horsley
Details
smoothing and hinting turned off (5.36 KB, image/png)
2006-09-01 07:13 UTC, Tom Horsley
Details
her's a bigger sample with more text (284.29 KB, image/png)
2006-09-01 07:30 UTC, Tom Horsley
Details
xmag of fonts under KDE (6.91 KB, image/png)
2006-09-01 09:35 UTC, Tom Horsley
Details
Same test under Fedora Devel (313.09 KB, image/png)
2006-09-01 10:38 UTC, Nicolas Mailhot
Details

Description Tom Horsley 2006-09-01 04:44:07 UTC
Just got the latest rpm updates for fedora core 5 and new dejavu fonts
showed up:

dejavu-fonts-makedefault-2.9.0-1.fc5
dejavu-fonts-2.9.0-1.fc5
dejavu-fonts-experimental-2.9.0-1.fc5

The lower case t appears to have bad problems with being positioned too
far to the left in its bounding box I'll attach a screenshot from text
on this bug entry page to demonstrate.
Comment 1 Tom Horsley 2006-09-01 04:45:25 UTC
Created attachment 6779 [details]
xmag screenshot

Every place a 't' shows up in serif, it is jammed against the letter to
the left like this.
Comment 2 Ben Laenen 2006-09-01 06:31:24 UTC
Could you post a screenshot with subpixel hinting disabled? I wonder if the 
fact that you have the cleartype patch applied is related to the problem.

But maybe this is just yet another autohinter problem.
Comment 3 Tom Horsley 2006-09-01 07:13:43 UTC
Created attachment 6782 [details]
smoothing and hinting turned off

I brought up gnome-font-properties and went to the Details... dialog
and turned off both smoothing and hinting, and my screen fonts certainly
look different, but the 't' is still crammed way over to the left as you
can see in this shot of this busgilla description from the bugzilla
web page.
Comment 4 Tom Horsley 2006-09-01 07:30:09 UTC
Created attachment 6783 [details]
her's a bigger sample with more text

Here's a shot of my home page with several bad looking
instances of 't' squishing circled.
Comment 5 Ben Laenen 2006-09-01 08:05:59 UTC
First, to make sure this isn't a problem of font caching, type "fc-cache" (not 
as root, as normal user) in a terminal window and logout and login again (to 
be really sure restart X as well). If the problem didn't go away, read on:

The font settings in your new screenshot still look exactly the same as your 
first one, so adjusting the settings didn't take any effect apparently. I'm 
not familiar with the dialogs in Gnome so I can't help you with that. Or you 
forgot to restart the application you took the screenshot in (note that in 
firefox all separate windows must be closed).

The screenshot I'm asking for should still have hinting applied, so you 
shouldn't turn that of. You can also keep antialiasing on (probably called 
smoothing there). I only want to have a shot without the subpixel hinting (if 
you zoom in in your screenshot, and see only gray pixels around the letters 
and no colours, you found the way to do it well). I hope the Gnome dialogs 
allow you to set specifically that though (if you have KDE installed, you can 
set it in KControl). The only other alternative other than that is to edit 
your fonts.conf file. If you do that you should have these lines in your 
~/.fonts.conf:

 <match target="font" >
  <edit mode="assign" name="hinting" >
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font" >
  <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle" >
   <const>hintfull</const>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font" >
  <edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
   <const>none</const>
  </edit>
 </match>

I really can't get the "t" to look the same on my system either. I tried all 
combinations of autohinter enabled/disabled and subpixel enabled/disabled, and 
the "t" always has the horizontal bar extending to the left of the vertical 
bar (like in the smaller font size in the left column of your thirds 
screenshot).

The fact that this also suddenly appears with the 2.9 is also very strange, 
because there were no changes made to it at all. Did you update other packages 
as well, like FreeType ?
Comment 6 Tom Horsley 2006-09-01 09:24:03 UTC
Running fc-cache and restarting X makes no difference.

I cut & pasted the .font.conf file from the text above, and when
I ran fc-cache again after that, it says:

Fontconfig error: "~/.fonts.conf", line 6: junk after document element

I don't see any junk, so I'm not sure what it is complaining about.

Here's my recent updates:

Aug 31 07:05:41 (yumex) Updated: slang.i386 2.0.6-1.fc5
Aug 31 07:05:42 (yumex) Updated: slang-devel.i386 2.0.6-1.fc5
Aug 31 07:05:42 (yumex) Updated: anacron.i386 2.3-39.fc5
Aug 31 07:05:45 (yumex) Updated: php-pear.noarch 1:1.4.9-1.2

Everything looked fine yesterday.

Sep 01 07:10:04 (yumex) Updated: dejavu-fonts.noarch 2.9.0-1.fc5
Sep 01 07:10:32 (yumex) Updated: parted.i386 1.7.1-15.fc5
Sep 01 07:10:33 (yumex) Updated: qtparted.i386 0.4.5-9.fc5
Sep 01 07:10:36 (yumex) Updated: dejavu-fonts-experimental.noarch 2.9.0-1.fc5
Sep 01 07:10:37 (yumex) Updated: dejavu-fonts-makedefault.noarch 2.9.0-1.fc5

After the above chunk of updates, I noticed the font problems.

Sep 01 10:38:39 (yumex) Updated: mkinitrd.i386 5.0.32-2
Sep 01 10:38:43 (yumex) Updated: enscript.i386 1.6.4-3.fc5

I also see someone has just started a thread in the fedora-list mailing
list about how the fonts look horrible after he just updated :-).

I should mention I am not running KDE or GNOME under normal circumstances.
Just an fvwm window manager with a few apps up (like emacs, xterm, and firefox)
so whatever voo-doo the different GNOME and KDE font controls do isn't
normally active. I'm getting the vanilla default behavior for font
rendering (until I start running gnome tools to fiddle with things).

I'll go see if I can switch to a KDE session briefly and see what results
I get after fiddling the kde control panel.
Comment 7 Tom Horsley 2006-09-01 09:35:17 UTC
Created attachment 6784 [details]
xmag of fonts under KDE

How strange - under KDE, things look much better (hopefully I don't
have to point out it is a bad idea to have fonts that only look
good under KDE :-).
Comment 8 Tom Horsley 2006-09-01 09:43:49 UTC
Actually, it appears as though the .fonts.conf file works even without KDE
and even with the error message fc-cache gives. When I went back to my
plain fvwm environment, the fonts look much better with the .fonts.conf
file, so it is the default font rendering that makes them look horrible.
(I swapped out .fonts.conf and the horrible stuff came back, swapped it
back in, and it went away).
Comment 9 Ben Laenen 2006-09-01 09:50:43 UTC
(In reply to comment #6)
> Running fc-cache and restarting X makes no difference.
> 
> I cut & pasted the .font.conf file from the text above, and when
> I ran fc-cache again after that, it says:
> 
> Fontconfig error: "~/.fonts.conf", line 6: junk after document element
> 
> I don't see any junk, so I'm not sure what it is complaining about.

yeah, my bad, I should have been more specific, you have to make sure that the 
part I mentioned above is put between the <fontconfig> and </fontconfig> tags. 
That may solve the fontconfig error.
Comment 10 Nicolas Mailhot 2006-09-01 10:38:56 UTC
Created attachment 6786 [details]
Same test under Fedora Devel

Seems ok in rawhide (dejavu 2.9.0 from FE, fc-cache -r before testing)
Comment 11 Nicolas Mailhot 2006-09-01 10:46:04 UTC
The "official" FE i386 dejavu packages are available at
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/5/i386 for those
wanting to test
Comment 12 Tom Horsley 2006-09-01 12:45:40 UTC
>Seems ok in rawhide (dejavu 2.9.0 from FE, fc-cache -r before testing)

Ah, but what happens if you create a new user with no ~/.font.conf file
and using something like a twm session rather than KDE or GNOME?

What kind of default font rendering do you get without the extra stuff
KDE and GNOME inject into the equation with all the resources they load
into the xserver and daemons they run to tweak thing?

That's the kind of environment where I see horrible font rendering.
Comment 13 Nicolas Mailhot 2006-09-02 02:56:32 UTC
(In reply to comment #0)
> Just got the latest rpm updates for fedora core 5 and new dejavu fonts
> showed up [...]
> The lower case t appears to have bad problems with being positioned too
> far to the left in its bounding box 

Tom: can you try to replace the rpm-provided TrueType files with the pre-build
versions in :
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/dejavu/dejavu-ttf-2.9.tar.gz?download ?

That would help pinpoint if the problem is in the Fedora Extras build stack or
somewhere else (Fedora Core rendering stack or DejaVu source files)
Comment 14 Ben Laenen 2006-09-02 06:46:41 UTC
Also, could you try out if Bitstream Vera Serif has the problem as well on 
your system?

The screenshots posted here that don't have the problem don't have subpixel 
hinting, so it's likely a problem related to that. Do you experience this 
problem in Firefox only, or do other programs have the same problem? Test 
something like Gedit and Konqueror.
Comment 15 Tom Horsley 2006-09-06 05:03:19 UTC
Some interesting results with other apps:

In gedit, if I force it to use what its font selector calls
DejaVu Serif Book, I see the same problem with the 't' as
firefox has. I also see this message on stderr where I started
gedit: sys:1: PangoWarning: Error loading GPOS table 4097

Still in gedit, if I tell it to use Bitstream Vera Serif Roman
I also see the problem with the 't', but I don't see an
error come out.

Weirdly, if I try oowriter, the text looks fine, I don't see the
error with the 't' (but perhaps oowriter digs up the gnome font
settings from wherever they are stashed - I never know how this
stuff works).

I'll try the fonts from sourceforge as soon as I figure out how to install
them from the tar file :-).
Comment 16 Denis Jacquerye 2006-09-06 05:27:36 UTC
(In reply to comment #15)
> I'll try the fonts from sourceforge as soon as I figure out how to install
> them from the tar file :-).

Copy them to your ~/.fonts directory with Nautilus.

Comment 17 Tom Horsley 2006-09-06 05:31:08 UTC
Started a KCD session and ran the font installer in admin mode to
make sure the new font files were really installed on a system-wide
basis, and I still see the problem with the 't' unless I put
back the ~/.fonts.conf file (which makes things look fine).
Comment 18 Tom Horsley 2006-09-06 05:33:22 UTC
After doing all this, I notice there is a kfontinst process using 100%
of the cpu that has accumulated 6 minutes of cpu time so far. I think
I'll reboot just to get everything back to a known state :-).
Comment 19 Tom Horsley 2006-09-06 05:45:05 UTC
One last piece of info: I tried konqueror on my home page, and explicitly
configured it to use dejavu serif as the default font, and it looks fine
rendering my homepage. Right next to it at the same time, firefox has
the problem with the 't', so what I'm concluding is that font rendering
is far too mysterious to understand :-).
Comment 20 Tom Horsley 2006-09-07 11:41:33 UTC
One more data point - if I run this command to look at my home page:

    MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 firefox

The the problems with the 't' don't show up, so it looks like the
default rendering by pango is the problem. The pango rpm's on
my system are the latest FC5 updates:

pango-1.12.3-1
pango-devel-1.12.3-1
Comment 21 nocturnaldreamer 2007-02-03 14:50:01 UTC
cleaning up


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