Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 431608
accents and punctuations in Liberation fonts are off writing hebrew texts
Last modified: 2008-03-03 08:08:40 EST
Description of problem: I am using Open Office (but not related to it, as far as I can tell) to write some text in Hebrew language with accents and punctuations. I get the punctuation marks off the right place in which they suppose to be. It works fine with several Open-Type fonts (Ezra SIL, Deja Vu...) so I guess it is an issue with the internals of the font itself ? (I hope I filed a bug report in the right place ;-) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: I can send a pdf or screen shot if it can help Steps to Reproduce: 1.write some punctuated Hebrew text in OpenOffice Writer 2.apply the Liberation Sans font to the text 3. Actual results: punctuation is off the font's position Expected results: punctuation should be under the respective font in which it was typed for. Additional info:
i've just downloaded "fontmatrix" and "fontforge" and found out that liberation fonts does not have Hebrew glyphs implemented at all :-( i was actually getting another font instead of liberation when i choose it in Writer (Open Office) and i didn't know. so... maybe we could close this bug and open a different one. "please add hebrew glyphs to liberation fonts" with the same font quality of DejaVu or Ezra SIL ? what do you say ?
Ok, so what was the name of the Hebrew font you saw in Openoffice? A screenshot might help.
> maybe we could close this bug and open a different one. I think we can continue discussing in this bug. > "please add hebrew glyphs to liberation fonts" with the same font quality of > DejaVu or Ezra SIL ? what do you say ? Adding hebrew to liberation-fonts may be a lot of work, but if someone is able to contribute suitable glyphs it might possible I guess. Do the equivalent commercial fonts cover Hebrew?
i have looked into the way OpenOffice uses fonts (http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Font-FAQ) made some debug tests with the FontConfig system and found out that since i have msttcorefonts package installed i get missing Hebrew Glyphs in Liberation Sans being replace with parallel glyphs from Ariel (MS font). according to "http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Font-FAQ" i can control this replacement at a system wide level - fontconfig or OO system wide level - $INSTALL/openoffice/share/registry/data/org/openoffice/VCL.xcu default font replacement setting or from the OO interface "Tools >> Options >> Fonts >> FRT" i talked to OOo people which told me TTF are less discriptive as regarding to punctuation marks and positioning them in a text line then OpenType fonts and that i should use OTF as much as i can. which means that Ariel TTF is probably OK but not good for Hebrew punctuation marks in OO. (OOo has a bug-report for improving the handling of ttf more completely) so let's close this one out :-) i will talk to the Culmus (free hebrew fonts) people and see if it is possible to get their Hebrew glyphs and use them in Liberation. dimension-wise and legal-wise. :-)
Ok, thanks for the information. If you find a problem when using culmus, dejavu or other free fonts with Hebrew glyphs, please reopen or file another bug.