Sunday, March 15, 2009

 

74 bugs

In a previous post I've talked about a bug affecting the ttf-dejavu package; I've extended the test to all font files in the Debian archive and come up with the following numbers: of the 192 packages containg at least one TrueType font file, 74 are affected by the digits width problem for a total of 672 ttf files.

Result are available here

The bug can be reproduced with pango-view (ttf-tmuni was chosen in this example):

perl -e 'for my $i (0..9){print "$i" x 80; print "\n";}'  > sample.txt
pango-view --font="Tibetan Machine Uni" --waterfall --dpi=72 -q -o out.png sample.txt

Comments are welcome before I start filing the bugreports

Labels:


Comments:
The arguments on #411308 are reasonable for many fonts. However, some fonts (like ttf-fifthhorseman-dkg-handwriting, which is my own handwriting) don't necessarily fall into the category of "fonts that would be used for annual reports" or "fonts that would be used in rapidly-updating user interfaces".

Is there a way to distinguish which fonts this might be applicable for before doing a mass bug filing?
 
Isn't this potentially an application bug? If the application wants tabular numbers (as opposed to proportional numbers), it should specifically request them, if available, using OpenType features (e.g. the tnum feature).

Unfortunately it doesn't seem like Pango supports this yet (at least in any easy way for developers to use), but it should.
 
"Is there a way to distinguish which fonts this might be applicable for before doing a mass bug filing?"

I suspected the bug might not be applicable to all fonts, that is way I've not filed any bugreport yet. A solution could be to file all the bugs and maintainers close it as wontfix: don't see how I could distinguish if the bug is applicable or not.
 
"Isn't this potentially an application bug?"

I'm not sure it is;
Notice that the bugreport was first reported in the context of the debian graphical installer: IIRC, you would see an increasing percentage skip here and there because of the bug.
 
A lot of good information. I come here all the time and am very happy with your updates, Thank you
 
Post a Comment

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?