Bug 467745

The glyph has hinting instructions in DejaVu to make sure the tail always appears. So you're probably using the Freetype autohinter, and hitting a bug in that (fonts don't have control over the autohinter).

Erm, how to find out, am I using autohinter or not?

I'm not using freetype-freeworld from linva, only stock one from Fedora.

Open your character map and look for U+F000 () in DejaVu Sans. If it looks like "88" you're using the autohinter. If it has a different number you're using hinting instructions from the font.

If you're only using Fedora packages you most likely have the autohinter enabled and the bytecode interpreter for the hinting instructions disabled (because of a patents issue).

(In reply to comment #2)
> Erm, how to find out, am I using autohinter or not?
> 
> I'm not using freetype-freeworld from linva, only stock one from Fedora.

If you're using stock Fedora you have the autohinter, which means the bug should be reassigned to freetype (but do the check Ben suggested first)

Yes, it's 88, so autohinter.

Nothing could be fixed in font itself? Reassign to freetype?

(In reply to comment #5)
> Nothing could be fixed in font itself?

Indeed, a font can't influence the behaviour of the autohinter in any way.

> Reassign to freetype?

Yes.

At what dpi?  I can't reproduce it.  Play with the numbers in the following command line and see which ones hit the bug for you:

$ pango-view  --text ц --font 'dejavu sans 8pt' --dpi 96

Also, a screenshot helps.  At the end, nothing I can do about it here.  Needs to be reported upstream to FreeType.

Created attachment 324400 [details]
Bad rendering at 8pt

Here are screenshots from gnome charmap at 8 and 10 pt.
I was unable to reproduce it with pango-view too.

Created attachment 324401 [details]
Bad rendering at 10pt

I've played with font setting in gnome appearance properties, it now renders properly for 10 pt, and I can't find setting with wrong rendering at that size.
But it renders without the tail for 8 pt with Medium and Full hinting.

Resolution is set to 86 dpi in that dialog.

86dpi is borderline for good text rendering. Microsoft has been targetting 100dpi for example for at least a decade in windows (reduced to 96 to give margins to shoddy hardware manufacturers).

If your hardware is really 86dpi (as in actual pixels per inch), there's not much the best font can do (screens sold to computer gamers have often this kind of low pixel density but gamers are not known for reading lots of text)

In paper print, for example, standard is 600dpi and 150 is already a bad-quality magazine.

(In reply to comment #11)
> 86dpi is borderline for good text rendering. Microsoft has been targetting
> 100dpi for example for at least a decade in windows (reduced to 96 to give
> margins to shoddy hardware manufacturers).
> 
> If your hardware is really 86dpi (as in actual pixels per inch), there's not
> much the best font can do (screens sold to computer gamers have often this kind
> of low pixel density but gamers are not known for reading lots of text)
> 
> In paper print, for example, standard is 600dpi and 150 is already a
> bad-quality magazine.

Low resolution or not, at these sizes there's no reason the autohinter shouldn't be able to render the tail correctly. It manages to do it with щ just fine as can be seen on the screenshots.

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