Verdana Bold rendering problems

[Adam Spain]

The middle part of the capital "N" in Verdana bold (and bold italic) is rendered too wide for me on Kubuntu Feisty at some font sizes. I don't remember this problem being present on Kubuntu Dapper. The whole of capitals "V" and "W" also appear to be too wide at some font sizes. The only customisation to my font setup I've done is changing my .fonts.conf in my home directory, and the problem still exists when I remove that.

The problem with the capital "N" can be seen in the "Science/Nature" heading on this page:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/default.stm

[Adam Spain (adamspain)]

In this image you can see the font preview from font installer in system settings, showing Verdana bold with Verdana bold italic below it. You can clearly see on the third line the "N", "V" and "W" are too bold, and the middle part of the "N" is too wide in Verdana bold italic on line 6.

[Adam Spain (adamspain)]

After further testing, it looks like you don't see this problem if you have the autohinter enabled. Make sure the autohinter is disabled if you are trying to reproduce the bug.

[Adam Spain (adamspain)]

After looking on the Freetype mailing list it looks like this is a known problem with rendering Verdana bold in anti-aliased mode:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/freetype/2006-11/msg00011.html

In particular in this post one of the Freetype authors says certain sizes of Verdana bold cannot be rendered properly in anti-aliased mode:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/freetype/2006-11/msg00042.html

It's damn annoying Linux still has these basic problems rendering the Microsoft fonts which are used so extensively on the web. As a work around I've added this rule to my .fonts.conf file in my home directory which (I think) disables anti-aliasing for bold Verdana at some font sizes:

<!-- Disable antialiasing for Verdana Bold at some font sizes-->
<match target="font" >
  <test compare="more" name="weight" >
   <const>medium</const>
  </test>
 <test name="family" qual="any" >
   <string>Verdana</string>
  </test>
  <!-- check font size -->
  <test compare="more_eq" name="pixelsize" qual="any" >
   <double>11</double>
  </test>
  <test compare="less_eq" name="pixelsize" qual="any" >
   <double>18</double>
  </test>
  <edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
   <bool>false</bool>
  </edit>
</match>

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Is this symptom still reproducible in 8.10 beta?

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to New. Thanks again!.