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

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Tue Jul 20 15:03:08 UTC 2010


  On 07/20/2010 10:50 AM, Jim Stichnoth wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 7:10 AM, Michael T. Dean 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.

Heh.  That may explain the issue that MythArchive had when we swapped to 
the newer FreeFonts ( http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/changeset/14025 ).  I 
wonder if we'll need to undo the changes that were made to fix 
MythArchive.  From the description it sounds like it should work, even 
if the font is "corrected" now.

>    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.

Yeah, that would explain why I don't remember seeing the issue (as I 
almost always have captions enabled).  I guess I just haven't seen the 
lowercase "st"combination (or figured it was an error in captions).

Thanks for the investigation and testing.  I'll get the new version in soon.

Mike


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