DejaVu / Pango / fontconfig problem with hinting of DejaVu Serif 10pt font

[Andrew Cowie]

GtkTextView / Pango / fontconfig are rendering DejaVu Serif 10pt strangely. Characters in this font should go nicely beside DejaVu Sans 10pt and DejaVu Sans Mono 10pt quite nicely on the same line, but the Serif is rendering funny.

Only at 10pt. These three fonts at 12pt are all rendering correctly alongside each other (9pt works too, interestingly).

You can perhaps see this problem by doing:

$ pango-view --font="DejaVu Sans Mono, 10" README &
$ pango-view --font="DejaVu Sans 10" README &
$ pango-view --font="DejaVu Serif 10" README &

where README is some large textfile. You'll see that the first two are nicely aligned, but that the characters in the Serif font are much smaller (they seem to be about 9pt, actually) although the line hights are correctly consistent in all three.

I'm not really in a rush to blame ttf-dejavu to be honest. Sitting with Carl Worth and Keith Packard a few hours ago, we did

$ fc-match -v "DejaVu Serif Book-10"

and got what looked to be correct numbers. That said, Ubuntu Jaunty's version of DejaVu is 2.25, and the Gentoo developer who just tried my example code and the `pango-view` commands above has 2.28 available to him and he could not observe the problem.

If you want to see it for yourself in my use case, you could grab bzr://research.operationaldynamics.com/bzr/java-gnome/hackers/andrew/bug-font-size/ and having built it, run

$ java -classpath tmp/gtk-4.0.jar:tmp/tests/ FontHeights

to avoid you having to do that, I've got three screenshots for you: one of it working at 12pt, and a second of it being busted at 10pt.

AfC

[Andrew Cowie (afcowie)]

Still occurring on Ubuntu Precise.

AfC

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for ttf-dejavu (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Andrew Cowie (afcowie)]

Still occurring on Ubuntu Quantal.

Please stop closing bugs that aren't fixed.

AfC

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.