Some glyphs temporarily rendered as others

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

Ubuntu 12.10

On one particular machine running Ubuntu 12.10, some text characters are substituted for different characters.

On April 2, almost every normal-weight "T" in Ubuntu 15px at normal weight was rendered as a bold "S". For example, "Text" was rendered as "Sext".
https://launchpadlibrarian.net/135923753/sext.png

On April 3, that Ubuntu "T" returned to normal, but "k" in the font used by Firefox when displaying Facebook wall posts was rendered as "d". For example, "Mark" was rendered as "Mard".

On April 4, the "k" returned to normal, but "p" in a particular sans-serif bold size was rendered as non-bold "ƒʹ", while "0" in a different sans-serif size was rendered as bold "g".
https://launchpadlibrarian.net/136149473/sext2.highlighted.png

The machine was restarted between April 2nd and 3rd, but only suspended between 3rd and 4th.

This problem occurs in multiple applications, including Firefox, Thunderbird, Tomboy, XChat, and Nautilus. It does not occur in LibreOffice (perhaps because it does not use GTK?), or in Ubuntu's menu bar (perhaps because it applies an inset to the text?).

[Originally reported by Nick Tait.]

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks, if the issue is specific to one machine it likely has to do with the installed fonts/user configuration.

Some questions
1- how did you set the font to use?
2- does it happen with another user (or in a guest session) on the same machine?
3- did you do any tweaking in the fonts configuration on that machine?

[Nobuto Murata (nobuto)]

I have experienced quite similar symptom in mid-session on my precise machine, my case is for Japanese characters.
If it happens, `fc-cache -fv` or `unity --replace`` does not recover it, I had to restart X session.

I have this issue after installing xserver-xorg-lts-quantal on precise, and going back to xserver-xorg-lts-precise seems to solve it.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

1. As shown in the second screenshot, the substitutions also occur with various fonts on Web pages. So it isn't related to how the font is chosen.

[Adolfo Jayme Barrientos (fitojb)]

I've seen this problem in LibreOffice, when using a guest account. I don't know how to reproduce it.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for pango1.0 (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]