Umlaut issues with Bitsream Vera Sans

[Per Bjornsson]

On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 02:53, Stefan Rotsch wrote:
> I've taken a screenshot showing the application menu (in german) - there
> have to be two dots above the letter "o" instead of just one:
> 
> http://www.stefanrotsch.de/stuff/20040812-fc3t1umlauts.png
> 
> Anyone else running a non-english locale seeing this?

I'm actually using a US locale but I do write in Swedish and, indeed, I
have noticed this issue, even in FC2 so it isn't new. As far as I can
tell it's an issue with how that font is rendered by Freetype at certain
sizes. It has just never bothered me enough to really care, but I just
checked a little when it seems to happen:

Screen resolution (as set in the font preferences panel) 96 dpi
Freetype version: 2.1.7-4 (this is on FC2)
Bitstream Vera Sans: Size 10 pt
Bitstream Vera Sans Mono: Size 10 and 11 pt

Strange. And, as you noticed, it only happens to the ö character, not
e.g. ä. Perhaps it is some kind of problem with the Freetype autohinter
that is used?

If you're in Germany, perhaps you could try rebuilding the Freetype
package with the TTF bytecode interpreter turned on (apparently there's
a switch in the code; Apple has a patent on the TTF bytecode
interpretation so it's turned off by default, and an auto-hinting
algorithm is used instead.) If that helps it's really very likely that
it's the autohinter that is doing something wrong. I'll see if I can
find time to fiddle with this as well.

Best regards,
Per Bjornsson

-- 
Per Bjornsson <perbj at stanford.edu>
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University