[Pkg-fonts-devel] ttf-tomsontalks and conversions from svg with fontforge

[Pier Luigi Pau <pigipau@gmail.com>]

Hello,

I was trying to investigate Debian bug #588649 on ttf-tomsontalks
(which I opened; spaces not shown for this font) and I noticed
something that I find odd.

First, I downloaded the source package for the font, and ran
dpkg-buildpackage. I opened the TomsonTalks.otf file, resulting from
the package building, in fontforge, and noticed that glyphs for space
characters appeared to be missing (preview crossed out). I forced a
width on the space (0x0020) character from the fontforge GUI, built
the font (new .otf file), and replaced the file at
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/tomsontalks by hand. This seems to have
restored the visibility of the space character.

Therefore, while the tomsontalks font may have other issues of its
own, I was speculating whether the invisible spaces could have its
roots in a bug in fontforge; perhaps it's not converting from svg
properly when the character is blank (no 'd' attribute in the XML).

This is speculation as I have no real experience with fontforge, or
creating and manipulating fonts in general.

Would anyone with better knowledge of fontforge be so kind to look
into this, and perhaps reassign the bug if it should be (or let me
know I should)?

Thanks in advance.
Pier Luigi Pau