[mythtv] [mythtv-commits] Ticket #8674: Use older version of FreeMono.ttf

Jim Stichnoth stichnot at gmail.com
Tue Jul 20 14:50:58 UTC 2010


On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 7:10 AM, Michael T. Dean
<mtdean at thirdcontact.com> wrote:
>  On 07/20/2010 12:49 AM, Jim Stichnoth wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 4:03 PM, Michael T. Dean wrote:
>>>
>>> Jim, in http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/3518 (
>>> http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/changeset/13588 ), we updated the version of
>>> the
>>> FreeFont fonts distributed with MythTV (to the 20060126 version, unless
>>> I'm
>>> mistaken) because the older version we were using was missing many glyphs
>>> (such as the eighth note, which is often used in captions to indicate
>>> music
>>> is playing or to indicate song lyrics).
>>
>> Mike, thanks for the comprehensive explanation.  I think there must be
>> some system fonts getting in the way on my system, as you suggested.
>> I will do some more investigation.
>
> Great.  Please let me know what you find.  I'd be happy to update to a newer
> version of FreeFont fonts, but as long as we're doing so, it would be nice
> to use current.  If they don't work, though, we may be able to update to the
> 2008 version you mentioned.

I just confirmed that (at least on my system) the latest 2009-01-04
FreeMono.ttf does not have the kerning problem, but the 2006-01-26
version included with MythTV does have the problem.  I tested this by
swapping mythtv/themes/FreeMono.ttf back and forth between different
versions, "make install", restart the frontend, and jump to a known
location in a known recording.  All this after removing all extra
copies of FreeMono.ttf from my MythTV installation that shouldn't be
there.  Because I could alternate between files and see alternating
good and bad behavior, I didn't need to dig further into issues around
the system font manager, font replacement rules, etc.  (Phew!)

So I think it would be great to go ahead and update to the latest
FreeFont (with a quick sanity check of the bold and non-mono fonts).

By the way, U.S. closed captions seem to be mostly in uppercase, which
doesn't show the kerning problems.  The most common instance of the
"st" kerning problem is when something is captioned as "(indistinct)".
 People who convert from captions to .srt files usually do automatic
lowercasing, making the kerning problem much more visible.

Jim


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