Bug#349657: Freefont Alef and Lamed combine
Package: openoffice.org
Version: 2.0.0-5
When the unicode character 0x05D0 (HEBREW LETTER ALEF)
is immediately followed by 0x05DC (HEBREW LETTER LAMED)
in the FreeSans or FreeSerif font, the two characters
combine and are replaced by 0xFB4F (HEBREW LIGATURE ALEF LAMED).
The ligature is an archaic form that is not used
in modern Hebrew. The combination of Alef followed by
Lamed is very common in Hebrew, so this bug renders
these fonts nearly unusable for any OOo document that
needs to include Hebrew text.
The upstream developers have verified that this bug
only occurs on the Debian build of OOo, so it appears
not to be a problem with OOo itself or with the font.
The characters become combined any time they are
next to each other - not just when they are input.
For example, when I input Alef and Lamed separated
by some other character, then delete the other character,
the Alef and Lamed then combine.
The bug occurs for FreeSans and FreeSerif, but NOT
FreeMono, from the ttf-freefont package, version
20051102-2. That package installs version 1.28 of the
fonts. The bug occurs in both Writer and Calc.
The following builds of OOo were tested by the upstream
developers using version 1.27 of freefont, downloaded from
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freefont/freefont-ttf.zip
and manually installed to OOo using spadmin, on
a Debian testing system:
a) Hebrew 2.0 from OpenOffice.org.il
b) English 2.0 from OpenOffice.org
c) English 2.0.1 from OpenOffice.org
d) Debian OOo package 2.0.0-5 (English)
The problem ONLY occured for (d), the Debian package
build.
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