Dejavu sans bold font broken on GREEK CAPITAL LETTER DELTA

[Sergio Callegari]

Font dejavu sans bold, as distributed in fonts-dejavu-core.deb incorrectly renders some chars and notably GREEK CAPITAL LETTER DELTA (U+0394).

Character is misrendered in acroread, by ghostscript and when printed to most postscript printers. Misrendering includes total or partial fill of the inside of the delta symbol.

Issue is nasty, because on ubuntu the font configuration is such that whenever one requires a greek letter on a sans font that does not include the greek gliphs, dejavu sans is automatically substituted.

The saucy package is affected (2.33t+svn...)
The package that is currently in trusty is also affected (2.34)

Issue is known to the dejavu fonts developers and fixed in snapshot 140118

Please consider for a SRU, or at least update the trusty package (that is installable in saucy).

[Sergio Callegari (callegar)]

Created attachment 93268
Test pdf document

Experiencing an issue with GREEK CAPITAL LETTER DELTA U+0394.

Char appears fine on screen in most applications (working on Ubuntu 13.10), e.g. libreoffice, okular, etc.

However char appears badly in other applications (acroread for linux, ghostscript based viewers) and most important cannot be properly printed on postscript printers, where the profile of the Delta gets completely filled with black ink.

In the attachment, please find a minimal pdf doc showing the issue, a ghostscript based rendering with the issue and a photo of the printed doc.

Problem is severe, because on most Linux distros most apps substitute DejaVu Sans for greek letters on all fonts that do not include them. This means that on linux, most docs including bold greek letters in a sans font do not print fine.

[Sergio Callegari (callegar)]

Created attachment 93269
Demo rendering of pdf file via ghostscript

[Sergio Callegari (callegar)]

Created attachment 93270
Doc printed on a postscript printer (HP 4100)

[Sergio Callegari (callegar)]

One more note:

Bug exists both with 2.33 version of the fonts (shipped with ubuntu 13.10) and with 2.34.

[Nocturnaldreamer (nocturnaldreamer)]

I have recently committed a fix for this bug, could you please check if the problem persists with the most recent snapshot at http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/snapshots/ ?

[Sergio Callegari (callegar)]

Thanks. Seems fixed at least on screen (tested with gs and acroread). Please let me have another day to test on postscript printers too before closing.

[Sergio Callegari (callegar)]

I confirm it is fixed

[Sergio Callegari (callegar)]

Fixed packages for saucy are available on my ppa callegar/test

[Nocturnaldreamer (nocturnaldreamer)]

Ok, thank you for testing!