Re: Problems with lmodern and FreeType (old style figures, etc.)

[Florent Rougon <f.rougon@free.fr>]

I have done some progress, but I cannot say everything is sorted out
yet.

  1. Rendering lmodern 0.99.3 with t1lib definitely works well as shown
     by:

       xglyph /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1/lmr10.pfb

     (enter some text such as abc0123456789 in the Test-String field,
     then click on String or AAString)

     [xglyph is a demo program for t1lib]

  2. Rendering lmodern 0.92 with FreeType does work well (simply install
     a .deb of version 0.92, start gedit, configure the font settings
     and try your favorite sample, which exhibits *both* known problems
     with 0.99.3: OsF and the small caps font selected by LMRoman10, as
     reported in #354537). That is why I didn't notice anything when I
     added X and defoma support to lmodern, although I made a bunch of
     screenshots. There was *no* problem at that time.

  3. Rendering lmodern 0.99.3 with FreeType exhibits the OsF problem but
     *not* the small caps issue (which is reassuring in some way, because
     it can't be a glyph rendering problem; rather, it must be one
     related to font selection). Proof:

       ftstring -m "abc0123456789" ppem /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1/lmr10.pfb

     [ftstring comes from freetype2-demos]

     Don't ask me about the "ppem" argument, it just seems to be
     mandatory.

  4. If you're still skeptical that FreeType renders lmodern 0.92
     correctly, fetch lmr10.pfb from lmodern 0.92 and run ftstring on
     it, as in step 3. It works fine.

So what?

  - t1lib works fine with all lmodern versions (AFAIK);

  - FreeType works fine with 0.92 but not with 0.99.3;

  - there is also the small caps issue (#354537), which would look like
    a fontconfig problem at a first glance, but again happens with
    lmodern 0.99.3 and *not* with 0.92...

Well, I don't know what to do next to move forward. Maybe it is time to
talk to the FreeType maintainers...

-- 
Florent