Re: Bug in FreeType? (normal digits rendered as old style figures with lmodern 0.99.3)

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

Ralf Stubner <ralf.stubner@physik.uni-erlangen.de> wrote:

> Great. Now I have to think about whether it makes sense to update to
> etch. IIRC it is very difficult/impossible to update freetype without
> recompiling depending apps. Hence freetype 2.2.1 probably won't make it
> to backports.org.

Well, I am quite ignorant about that, but I rebuilt the freetype package
from unstable and it does work. If you want to try, you can take it
from:

  deb http://people.debian.org/~frn/experiments sarge main
  deb-src http://people.debian.org/~frn/experiments sarge main

It fixes the problem with ftstring, oowriter, gedit and "xterm -fa", and
more generally (I think), everything that is linked to
/usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6.

Unfortunately, it doesn't fix the problem with xfontsel. I am pretty
sure the reason is because XFree86[1] embeds an outaded FreeType copy
that must be used with dlopen() or something like that (it's a "module"
for XFree86). I tried to replace this copy with FreeType 2.2.1 but this
isn't a trivial task... After I adapted the debian patches for the new
version, I found that the XFree86 build system wants to deal with an
autohint.c file from the old FreeType which is not present in FreeType
2.2.1, and I didn't manage to fix this. I (much more quickly) tried the
same with the xorg-x11 source package from bpo (which embeds FreeType
2.1.9) but it still uses these #@*$* Imakefiles for building and insists
on the very same autohint.c file...

  [1] As well as the X.org in bpo---didn't look at the one in
     'unstable'.

-- 
Florent