DejaVu Serif Italic capital letters and digits broken

Bug #1992369 reported by Stephan Walter
14
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
fonts-dejavu (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

After updating from Focal to Jammy, I noticed that DejaVu Serif Italic looks quite broken. At least the letters EFHKLMNT and the digits 1 and 4 are affected

Please see the attached screenshot. This was obtained from `gnome-font-viewer /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSerif-Italic.ttf`

As the font is the default for me in Firefox, it's quite noticeable.

$ dpkg -l gnome-font-viewer fonts-dejavu-extra
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Architecture Description
+++-==================-============-============-==============================>
ii fonts-dejavu-extra 2.37-2build1 all Vera font family derivate with>
ii gnome-font-viewer 41.0-2 amd64 font viewer for GNOME

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Revision history for this message
Stephan Walter (stephan-walter) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Stephan Walter (stephan-walter) wrote :

Added screenshot from Libreoffice, showing it affects multiple applications and font sizes

description: updated
tags: added: foundations-triage-discuss
Revision history for this message
Lukas Märdian (slyon) wrote :

There was no change in the fonts-dejavu package between Focal -> Jammy.

Changed in fonts-dejavu (Ubuntu):
status: New → Invalid
tags: removed: foundations-triage-discuss
tags: added: jj-rls-incoming
Revision history for this message
Brian Murray (brian-murray) wrote :

I was unable to recreate this bug using these packages:

Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Architecture Description
+++-==================-============-============-=====================================================================
ii fonts-dejavu-extra 2.37-2build1 all Vera font family derivate with additional characters (extra variants)
ii gnome-font-viewer 41.0-2 amd64 font viewer for GNOME

Changed in gnome-font-viewer (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Low
tags: added: rls-jj-incoming
removed: jj-rls-incoming
Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

the issue is not likely in the font nor the viewer but in the rendering stack, I can't confirm here either. Could you give a bit more details on the desktop environment/fonts settings/locale you are using and include the output of

$ gsettings list-recursively org.gnome.desktop.interface | grep font

?

Changed in gnome-font-viewer (Ubuntu):
status: New → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Stephan Walter (stephan-walter) wrote :

$ gsettings list-recursively org.gnome.desktop.interface | grep font
org.gnome.desktop.interface document-font-name 'Cantarell 11'
org.gnome.desktop.interface font-antialiasing 'grayscale'
org.gnome.desktop.interface font-hinting 'slight'
org.gnome.desktop.interface font-name 'Noto Sans 9'
org.gnome.desktop.interface font-rgba-order 'rgb'
org.gnome.desktop.interface monospace-font-name 'Monospace 10'
$

I'm using the integrated graphics processor on an Intel i3-8100 CPU with Xubuntu / xfce4.

While I agree that it may not be a problem with the actual font, I clicked through many fonts available in gnome-font-viewer and only saw problems with these:

DejaVu Serif, Condensed Bold Italic
DejaVu Serif, Bold Italic
DejaVu Serif, Italic
DejaVu Serif, Condensed Italic

Changed in gnome-font-viewer (Ubuntu):
status: Incomplete → New
Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Changed in gnome-font-viewer (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Juha Aatrokoski (jha-kurp) wrote (last edit ):

The broken font is only visible (at least for me) when using v35 of the truetype interpreter i.e. FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="truetype:interpreter-version=35" in the environment (required for horizontal hinting i.e. non-blurry fonts). (EDIT: also requires hinting to be medium or full, looks to be fine with slight or none.) With the default interpreter (v40) it looks fine.

And the problem is in the font package itself: installing package fonts-dejavu-extra from Focal fixes the font also for v35. If the font itself has not changed from Focal to Jammy, then the problem might be in the build system (fontforge?).

Changed in fonts-dejavu (Ubuntu):
status: Invalid → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

Could someone perhaps try to report the problem on https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/issues ?

Revision history for this message
Danilo Egea Gondolfo (danilogondolfo) wrote :

Not sure where the problem is exactly but it can be reproduced like Juha suggested.

On Xubuntu 22.04 if you go to Settings -> Appearance -> Fonts and set "Hinting" to "Medium" or "Full" and have FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="truetype:interpreter-version=35", all the DejaVuSerif...Italic fonts appear to break.

Either changing the interpreter version to 38 or 40 [0] or setting "hinting" to "Slight" seems to be a workaround.

[0] - https://freetype.org/freetype2/docs/reference/ft2-properties.html#interpreter-version

Revision history for this message
Danilo Egea Gondolfo (danilogondolfo) wrote :

I just noticed that this font (and many others) are marked as "experimental" even in the most recent version of the source [0] [1]. So it might be broken in some scenarios.

I opened an issue to clarify if that might be the case [2].

Meanwhile, if you change your XFCE font settings like mentioned above, does it help?

[0] - https://git.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fonts-dejavu/tree/README.md?h=applied/ubuntu/kinetic
[1] - https://github.com/dejavu-fonts/dejavu-fonts/blob/master/README.md
[2] - https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freetype/freetype/-/issues/1193

Revision history for this message
Stephan Walter (stephan-walter) wrote :

Looking into this again, I found that I had the following line in /etc/environment:

FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="truetype:interpreter-version=35 cff:no-stem-darkening=1 autofitter:warping=1"

I can't remember why I set this, probably some hinting issues in an old Xubuntu version.
Removing it causes v40 of the interpreter to be used, fixing the broken letters.

The font is obviously broken when used with v35, but few people are going to notice unless they're as clumsy as me, so you may want to close the ticket.

I also found out that `ftview` from the freetype2-demos package is great for investigating these issues, as it lets you cycle through all the relevant settings.

Thanks for your help and apologies for not realising that I had a non-standard setup.

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

@Stephan, thanks for the update. I'm not going to close it as invalid because as pointed out by people previously it seems the font didn't have the issue in past series, even if the setting is non standard and the priority low as a result there might still be an issue there.

Changed in gnome-font-viewer (Ubuntu):
status: Confirmed → Invalid
Changed in fonts-dejavu (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Low
Revision history for this message
Danilo Egea Gondolfo (danilogondolfo) wrote :

It turns out the font files in our package are probably corrupt. I tested with the files from the original source [0] and the problem doesn't happen.

I also replaced the broken ones with the original ones, cleaned my font cache and the problem appears to be gone.

Will try to find out when it happened.

[0] - https://github.com/dejavu-fonts/dejavu-fonts/releases

Revision history for this message
Danilo Egea Gondolfo (danilogondolfo) wrote :

These fonts are working fine in Focal (fonts-dejavu-extra_2.37-1_all.deb) and broken in Jammy, Kinetic and Lunar (fonts-dejavu-extra_2.37-2build1_all.deb).

Revision history for this message
Danilo Egea Gondolfo (danilogondolfo) wrote (last edit ):

Digging a bit more on that, the problem might be the font build system. The most recent fonts-dejavu-extra package is shared across Jammy, Kinetic and Lunar and it appears to be broken on all of them.

Rebuilding the package on Kinetic seems to be enough to fix the problem. But that's not true for Jammy. So I suppose whatever was broken (maybe fontforge?) was fixed in the version we use in Kinetic.

A no-change build is probably enough to fix the issue on Kinetic and Lunar.

tags: added: rls-jj-notfixing rls-kk-notfixing
removed: rls-jj-incoming
Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

This bug was fixed in the package fonts-dejavu - 2.37-2build2

---------------
fonts-dejavu (2.37-2build2) lunar; urgency=medium

  * No-change rebuild with newer fontforge to fix LP: #1992369.

 -- Steve Langasek <email address hidden> Thu, 08 Dec 2022 16:23:21 +0000

Changed in fonts-dejavu (Ubuntu):
status: Confirmed → Fix Released
no longer affects: gnome-font-viewer (Ubuntu)
no longer affects: fontforge (Ubuntu)
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