Re: blurry fonts (again)

[Florian Kulzer <florian.kulzer+debian@icfo.es>]

On Thu, Nov 05, 2009 at 16:40:06 -0500, Celejar wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Nov 2009 22:34:26 +0100 Florian Kulzer wrote:

[ I sent test files to Celejar off-list. ]

> > The files are attached; I am curious to find out whether the fonts
> > chosen by my system resulted in correct Hebrew typesetting.
> 
> I'm no font / typography expert, but they look pretty good; they
> certainly aren't mangled and overlapping as mine are.

OK, so let's recap:

You print the Hebrew Wikipedia homepage with "print to file" in
iceweasel. You get a PDF with misaligned Hebrew characters (kerning
seems to be off) and this font information:

name                                 type              emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
FrankRuehlCLM                        Type 1            yes no  yes      5  0
FrankRuehlCLM                        Type 1            yes no  yes      7  0
BitstreamVeraSerif                   CID TrueType      yes no  yes     37  0

I do the same thing and I get a PDF with properly aligned Hebrew
characters and this font information:

name                                 type              emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
TimesNewRomanBold                    CID TrueType      yes no  yes      5  0
TimesNewRoman                        CID TrueType      yes no  yes      7  0
DejaVuSans                           CID TrueType      yes no  yes     38  0

I checked my "good" PDF with pdfedit and the Hebrew characters are
indeed typeset in TimesNewRoman and TimesNewRomanBold. DejaVuSans is
used only for the extra information in headers and footers (URL, page
number, date, time). Your "bad" PDF uses the FrankRuehlCLM font for the
Hebrew text and BitstreamVeraSerif for headers and footers.

I think there could be a problem with the FrankRuehlCLM font (package
"culmus") or pango has a bug with Type 1 fonts. You could try to
downgrade libpango1.0-0 and friends to their Lenny versions (provided
that this does not break anything else on your system, of course) or you
could remove the culmus package so that icewesel is forced to use e.g.
the DejaVuSerif font for Hebrew passages. (The DejaVu fonts are extended
versions of their BitstreamVera ancestors; they include Hebrew
charcters.)

-- 
Regards,            |
          Florian   |