bugFree UCS Outline Fonts - Bugs: bug #15791, Weird strings in freefont fonts

 
 

bug #15791: Weird strings in freefont fonts

Submitter:  Christian Perrier <bubulle>
Submitted:  Sat 18 Feb 2006 10:16:00 AM UTC
   
 
Category:  font info Severity:  3 - Normal
Item Group:  None Status:  Fixed
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  Stevan_White
Open/Closed:  Closed Release:  * 2006-01-26
* Mandatory Fields

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Sun 10 Feb 2008 10:50:32 AM UTC, comment #4: 

Regarding the string itself:

I got an old version of FreeMono that contained the string.
In FontForge, it is found under
Font Information -> TTF Names ... Russian Sample

And it appears mangled there too.
But it starts with something that looks Russian: "В чаща"

I poked around, and I found it! 
A traditional telegraph test that is nearly a pangram lacking only the letters ъ and ё from the Russian alphabet:

В чащах юга жил бы цитрус? Да, но фальшивый экземпляр!
(Would a citrus live in the bushes of the south? Yes, but only a fake specimin!)

Come on.  That's great!
In a future release, I'll re-insert a properly encoded version
of this test string (and double-check it doesn't break the font tools.)

Steve White <Stevan_White>
Group administrator
Sun 10 Feb 2008 10:05:43 AM UTC, comment #3: 

Christian,

This issue, and the fixes for it, have become a bit messy. 
I'll write down what I know.

A) I think it should be a good thing to have test strings for various scripts embedded in the font.  Although changes have been
made in CVS to fix this, I'm leaving the report open, since I (and
somebody else) think the Russian string was a good idea, although
the way it was inserted may have been flawed.

B) There are now two repositories for freefont, one at Savannah
and one at Debian.  They are a bit tangled up, starting with a
fix for this bug report.  Here is what appears to have happened
in the repositories regarding this report:

1) a change was made to freefont CVS, 2006-05-04  Primoz Peterlin
   The changelog says
   "sfd/FreeMono.sfd: deleted Russian sample text,
    which did not conform to UTF-7."
   So this indicates that Primoz thought the string was improperly
   encoded.

2) A similar change, presumably using the attached patch, was
   applied to the then-new Debian ttf-freefont package, which
   starts from the freefont CVS of 2006-05-01

So changes have been made in both places to fix the present problem.

The difficulty however, is that at least one further change was made to the font files in the freefont CVS, while a several other  changes have since been made to the Debian ttf-freefont CVS.

Still trying to sort this out.

Steve White <Stevan_White>
Group administrator
Sat 09 Feb 2008 10:52:02 AM UTC, comment #2: 

Christian,

Several notes:

First, he change you requested seems already to have been applied.
In CVS annotate for FreeMono.sfd:
1.28         (peterlin 04-May-06): LangName: 1049 "" "" "+BB4EMQRLBEcEPQRLBDkA" "" "" "" "" "" "" "" "" "" "" "" "http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html" "" "" "" "" ""
I don't see the strings in question in FreeMono.sfd

I have my doubts about this being a bug with the font.
The first problem you describe appears to be a bug in
fttools
and perhaps that bug resulted in the problem with
ttx
Do you have further evidence that the "unknown 19" message is something non-standard, rather than an ommission in fttools?

You remarked that non-Latin test strings don't appear in other Debian fonts.  Perhaps something should be done about that.

For now, I'm leaving this open, even though it appears to have
already been dealt with, because I think something better could be done.

Steve White <Stevan_White>
Group administrator
Tue 02 May 2006 06:32:57 AM UTC, comment #1: 

It seems that the sample for Russian in FreeMono is currently what's broken

Christian Perrier <bubulle>
Group Member
Sat 18 Feb 2006 10:16:00 AM UTC, original submission:  

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=353304

Run ftinfo -a *.ttf|grep "lazy dog" in the directory where the freefont
ttf's are. Result:

FreeMonoBoldOblique.ttf: 0: 36 name: Microsoft, Unicode, English - United
States, unknown 19: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
FreeMonoBold.ttf: 0: 9 name: Macintosh, Roman, English, unknown 19: The
quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

[etc..]

Also foreign versions of the "lazy dog" sentence are present:

FreeMono.ttf: 0: 19 name: Microsoft, Unicode, German - Germany, unknown 19:
Zw�f Boxk�pfer jagen Victor quer �er den gro�n Sylter Deich.

AFAIK no other font files in Debian have such strings in them.

They are not really font names, right? Including test strings in the
font is all good fun, but there is one problem: these strings may
interfere with the operation of fonttools.

For instance ttx FreeMono.ttf produces a FreeMono.ttx file which contains

<namerecord nameID="19" platformID="3" platEncID="1" langID="0x419">
 &#1042;&#1095;&#1072;&#1097;&#1072;&#65535;&#65535;&#63505;&#14352;&#52240;
 &#65535;&#65028;&#13828;&#14340;&#1073;&#1099;&#1083;&#1094;&#1080;&#1090;
 &#1088;&#1091;&#1089;&#8230;&#8212;&#1076;&#65535;,&#1085;&#65535;&#65535;
 &#63505;&#4112;&#49168;&#60433;&#12305;&#8208;&#57360;&#51217;&#11280;&#65535;
 &#65028;&#19716;&#14852;&#14084;&#13572;&#15364;&#65535;&#65535;.
</namerecord>

Maybe this is Russian, but whatever this is, it causes ttx to choke (with a
remark about "illegal character") when the ttx file is re-converted into
ttf. I'd suggest it is better to remove these strings. That "unknown 19"
suggests something non-standard anyway.

Christian Perrier <bubulle>
Group Member

 

(Note: upload size limit is set to 16384 kB, after insertion of the required escape characters.)

Attach Files:
   
   
Comment:
   

Attached Files
file #9877:  006_remove-russian-sample added by bubulle (1KiB - text/x-diff - Patch to remove broken Russian sample)

 

Depends on the following items: None found

Items that depend on this one: None found

 

Carbon-Copy List
  • -email is unavailable- added by Stevan_White (Updated the item)
  • -email is unavailable- added by bubulle
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    Follow 9 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2008-02-13 Stevan_White StatusProceeding Fixed
        Open/ClosedOpen Closed
    2008-02-09 Stevan_White CategoryNone font info
    2008-01-31 Stevan_White Assigned topeterlin Stevan_White
        ReleaseNone 2006-01-26
    2006-05-11 peterlin StatusNone Proceeding
        Assigned toNone peterlin
    2006-05-02 bubulle Attached File- Added 006_remove-russian-sample, #9877
    2006-02-18 bubulle Carbon-Copy- Added -email is unavailable-

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