[Impact]
The bug effects users of languages that make use of accents and umlauts. This includes at least German and French. All users that use Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 with the default font Cantarell in one of the effected languages will see "display errors" in words that contain one of the effected letters as they are overlayed by other letters. This affects at least Firefox.
[Test Case]
1. You can do this test case from Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 or from the Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 Live DVD. To do it from the live DVD, I at first had to update my Firefox:
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install firefox
2. Open Firefox and navigate to
https://forum.ubuntuusers.de/topic/umlaut-ue-ue-in-firefox-ueberschneidet-sich-mi/
Does the tab label correctly show the accented characters?
After installing the fonts-cantarell update, please close your Firefox completely, wait a few moments and then re-open Firefox.
[Regression Potential]
Low. The updated font was released 4 months ago and is shipped in all major GNOME 3.20 distros. Debian testing and yakkety have had this update for over a month.
https://git.gnome.org/browse/cantarell-fonts/tree/NEWS (from .21 to .24)
GNOME historically had a micro-release exception for stable release updates. There is no test suite but it's unclear to me whether an automated test suite is practical for a font.
See the commit log:
https://git.gnome.org/browse/cantarell-fonts/log
There is some refactoring but I think it makes more sense to just take .24 than to try to separate out which commits are more important.
.
[Original Bug Report]
Some characters in the Cantarell font, e.g., å, ê, and ü, have zero width in version 0.0.21-1. This makes them display incorrectly and overlap other letters. According to the Debian bug https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=822762 the issue has been fixed in version 0.0.24-1. Could we please get this version in Xenial so my name can be shown correctly?
[ Alternate Test Case]
I had trouble duplicating the bug with this test case -jbicha
1. From Ubuntu GNOME 16.04, open the Settings app.
2. Click Region and Language and set the language to French. If the French translations aren't installed, it will prompt you to install them. You may need to select French again after installing the additional files. GNOME should prompt you to restart your session to switch to the new language. (If not, just log out and log in again).
3. Open The gnome tweak tool. The label on the Fonts menu ("Fenêtres") is not displayed correctly.
Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.