Re: [Paps-discuss] Combining characters not rendered properly

[Jan W. S. <jst...@pl...>]

Tho...@si... wrote:
> There are still problems with positioning and spacing of
> combining characters which are demonstrated with the attached
> example file; user paps --font "monospace 20" for a nice demo
> output to check on screen.

This is interesting. It seems to depend on the font being used.

The sequence 0x61 0xCC 0x80 (a followed by combining `) should
produce something looking like =C3=A0. It does not, when the font is
"monospace" on my system. In my case, "monospace" is actually
Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Also, when I say

=2E/paps --font "Courier New 20" testpaps >testpaps.ps

the accents are wrongly placed.

However, when I say

=2E/paps --font "freemono 20" testpaps >testpaps.ps

the accents are placed OK! (Perhaps apart from U+323; but I do not
know where it ought to be placed).

This suggests that several fonts have bugs (fonts are basically
"interpreted programs" nowadays, so they can have bugs!):

-- either both Bitstream Vera Sans Mono and Courier New have bugs;
-- or Freemono has bugs, and somehow Pango uses a work-around
   which is itself a bug, causing it to fail with the other
   fonts. I'll investigate this using fontforge; in the meantime,
   could you confirm the different behaviour of the fonts?

> since you know the pango interface being used, it's probably
> better the paps maintainers report the problem there than if I
> would do it)

By "you" I suppose you mean the collective readership of this
list. I am sure the developers read this list. Hello, hello, Dov,
Akira, can you confirm this?

Regards, Jan