symbol font contains infinity symbol where a bullet should be

[Captain Chaos]

The symbol.ttf font installed by this package contains an infinity symbol where a bullet should be. You can check this by opening Character Map, selecting the Symbol font and navigating to character 0x2022 (name "BULLET", description "small black circle") and observing that the actual character displayed there looks like an infinity symbol (or rather an 8 on its side).

Among other things this is causing bullet points in PDF's to be displayed as infinity symbols by Evince.

The place where the infinity symbol *should* be also appears to contain the wrong character, if you go to character 0x221e (name "INFINITY"), it actually displays an open circle. Many other characters also appear to be wrong, so possibly this is intentional and has to do with some weird Windows compatibility issue, but if that is the case, this font should not be installed as the default Symbols font for the entire operating system!

[Jack Leigh (leighman)]

from https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wine1.2/+bug/461233

When I open this pdf (attached) with evince, some formulas are rendered incorrectly (eg. p. 71). This also happens in Okular.
Confirmed here wine 1.3.

see also https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wine1.2/+bug/605670

[Jack Leigh (leighman)]

Attachment is too big to upload so Launchpad upload is linked under url
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wine1.2/+bug/461233/+attachment/889369/+files/coursenotes00.pdf

[Removed by request (removed1836289)]

For the record, because this bug description is completely confusing:

"""
launchpad:
reassigning to the wine1.2 package (which produces the ttf-symbol-replacement deb)
"""

Apparently, the symbol font produced by wine contains some incorrect glyphs, such as sigma.

[Dmitry-baikal (dmitry-baikal)]

What Windows application is this bug about? How to reproduce the problem
with a win32 app?

[Removed by request (removed1836289)]

(In reply to comment #3)
> What Windows application is this bug about? How to reproduce the problem
> with a win32 app?

This is an issue with fonts/symbol.ttf, which ubuntu uses to create the ttf-symbol-replacement package. From what I understand anyway...

[Dmitry-baikal (dmitry-baikal)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> > What Windows application is this bug about? How to reproduce the problem
> > with a win32 app?
>
> This is an issue with fonts/symbol.ttf, which ubuntu uses to create the
> ttf-symbol-replacement package. From what I understand anyway...

It would be helpful to at least describe what exactly the problem is,
and how to reproduce it.

[Jack Leigh (leighman)]

Several users report that when this font is installed by wine some symbols (such as the sigma on p. 71 of the pdf) in pdfs viewed in Evince and Okular (native Linux apps) are incorrectly displayed.

[Austin English (austinenglish)]

(In reply to comment #3)
> What Windows application is this bug about? How to reproduce the problem
> with a win32 app?

It's easy to see in native evince with:
wget http://www.fairchildsemi.com/ds/CD%2FCD4066BC.pdf
sudo apt-get install ttf-symbol-replacement
evince CD_CD4066BC.pdf

there are comparison screenshots on launchpad:
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/51948181/screenshot-OK.png
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/51948191/screenshot-wrong.png

I tried with a windows version of evince, but it doesn't have the problem (though it does crash because of missing helvetica).

[Dmitry-baikal (dmitry-baikal)]

*** Bug 24731 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Wbreyha (wbreyha)]

Opening the symbol.ttf in fontforge (lots of warnings) and decoding it with ttx shows that the unicode mappings (cmap_format_4) are messed up in this font.

I was able to "repair" it with fontforge with the following steps:

*) open symbol.ttf
*) Encoding->Force Encoding->Symbol
*) Encoding->Reencode->Macintosh Latin
*) File->Generate Fonts... (ignore warnings and save)

Then
*) remove symbol.ttf from whereever it was installed
*) call "fc-cache" as root (-v if you like)
*) copy the new symbol.ttf saved with fontforge to the old path
*) restart the application which displayed the damaged symbols

My "pi" bug 24731 is fixed then.

[Roman (m01brv)]

Indeed, the issue is with the unicode encoding. In my case, e.g., the degree sign (U+00B0) was rendered as uppercase Upsilon which is wrongly mapped in the wine's Symbol font by the same code. And wine's unicode code for the degree symbol is U+221e, which normally refers to the math infinity sign.

I think it would be great if this font was somehow prevented to override other system fonts for native linux applications, even after the unicode mismatch issue is corrected. Why my usual linux apps should be forced to use a wine's font?

[Winehq-f (winehq-f)]

This bug still exists in Wine 1.3.29 and yet there has been no activity on it for a year. Is anyone looking into it? The symbols.ttf font has a long list of incorrect mappings, and since the Ubuntu packages install this font as the default Symbols font for the entire system, it affects many programs, at least on Ubuntu. I suspect the same may be true for many other distributions.

Where did this font come from? Was it created by the Wine project? If so, can it please be fixed? If not, then who created it and can we get them to fix it?

If none of this is possible, then can it at least not be installed as the default Symbols font for the entire OS?

I'd also say this bug can be confirmed, and the importance upgraded a little.

[Winehq-f (winehq-f)]

Here is a partial list of incorrect mappings in symbols.ttf (this is just from the "Mathematical Operators" Unicode block:

0x2206 INCREMENT (displayed as an empty set symbol)
0x220f N-ARY PRODUCT (displayed as a division operator)
0x2211 N-ARY SUMMATION (displayed as a filled circle)
0x221a SQUARE ROOT (displayed as a squiggle)
0x221e INFINITY (displayed as an open circle)
0x222b INTEGRAL (displayed as three stacked horizontal bars)
0x2248 ALMOST EQUAL TO (displayed as a circled plus sign)
0x2260 NOT EQUAL TO (displayed as an up arrow)
0x2264 LESS-THAN OR EQUAL TO (displayed as a double quote)

Like I said, this is just from the "Mathematical Operators" block, I didn't check any other blocks, although we know there must be other blocks involved since the bullet symbol at least is also wrong and that is in the "General Punctuation" block. This is just to demonstrate the extent of the problem.

[Captain Chaos (launchpad-chaos)]

I discovered that there is already a Wine bug about this, and linked to it.

In the mean time, until the font is fixed, can the package at least be changed so that this font is not installed as the system-wide default Symbols font?

[Scott Ritchie (scottritchie)]

Captain Chaos that should already be the case...ttf-symbol-replacement and ttf-symbol-replacement-wine1.3 were removed in Oneiric and the font now installs into the (wine only) /usr/share/wine/fonts

[Captain Chaos (launchpad-chaos)]

Is it possible to back port that fix to Natty? Many people are reporting this problem (it manifests as bullets being shown as infinity symbols in Evince, for instance), without realising the underlying problem, so it would be good to fix it for them (without forcing everybody to upgrade to Oneiric).