Auto-hinter muddles tildes/macrons in Ubuntu font <19px (ñĀÃāãŌÕōõ)

[TaaviIlves]

1. Copy and paste this line into the address field of a Web browser:
data:text/html;charset=UTF-8,<p style="font-family:Ubuntu;font-size:20;"> ñĀÃāãŌÕōõ</p>

2. Reduce the font-size until the tildes ˜ become indistinguishable from the macrons ¯.

Rendered in 13pt Regular

Sample Glyphs:

õ

Description:

At size 18 and less õ looks o that doesn't have tilde but simple line on it. I don't know if it's a bug but there may be different similar letters in other languages. Õ is estonian font.

UA String:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100915 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.10

[Gerhard Großmann (gerhard-grossmann)]

Also affects the letters ñ and ã
the tilde also becomes a line for Õ (17–15pt, 13–12pt) and Ã Ñ (at 11pt).
Rendered in Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100915 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.10

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

This is a problem with the auto-hinter, not with the font. With the font's manual hinting, macrons and tildes are distinguishable at all sizes down to 9px and possibly smaller. With the auto-hinter, Ā and à are distinguishable from 12px upwards, but most of the others aren't distinguishable until 19px upwards.

[Nikolaus Waxweiler (madleser)]

On FT 2.6.2, i can distinguish all glyphs with teh autohinter down to "size: 12".

[Hugh McMaster (hmcmaster)]

No longer affected.