Sat 18 Feb 2006 11:18:11 AM UTC, original submission:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=349657
When the unicode character 0x05D0 (HEBREW LETTER ALEF)
is immediately followed by 0x05DC (HEBREW LETTER LAMED)
in the FreeSans or FreeSerif font, the two characters
combine and are replaced by 0xFB4F (HEBREW LIGATURE ALEF LAMED).
The ligature is an archaic form that is not used
in modern Hebrew. The combination of Alef followed by
Lamed is very common in Hebrew, so this bug renders
these fonts nearly unusable for any OOo document that
needs to include Hebrew text.
The characters become combined any time they are
next to each other - not just when they are input.
For example, when I input Alef and Lamed separated
by some other character, then delete the other character,
the Alef and Lamed then combine.
The bug occurs for FreeSans and FreeSerif, but NOT
FreeMono, from the ttf-freefont package, version
20051102-2. That package installs version 1.28 of the
fonts. The bug occurs in both Writer and Calc.
The following builds of OOo were tested by the upstream
developers using version 1.27 of freefont, downloaded from
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freefont/freefont-ttf.zip
and manually installed to OOo using spadmin, on
a Debian testing system:
a) Hebrew 2.0 from OpenOffice.org.il
b) English 2.0 from OpenOffice.org
c) English 2.0.1 from OpenOffice.org
d) Debian OOo package 2.0.0-5 (English)
The problem ONLY occured for (d), the Debian package
build.
From: Yitzchak Gale <gale@sefer.org>
To: -unavailable-
Cc: yba@tkos.co.il, -unavailable-
Subject: This is a font bug
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 03:45:08 +0200
I now believe that this is a bug in
the fonts. It is still a mystery to me
why this problem only occurs in the
Debian build, though.
Please forward this bug to
ttf-freefont, and upgrade severity
to important.
In the freetype fonts, the OpenType
feature tag for the Alef-Lamed ligature (0xFB4F)
is "liga", which means "Standard Ligature".
That implies that the ligature is mandatory.
But this ligature certainly should not be
mandatory. The correct feature tag for this
ligature should be "dlig", which means
"Discretionary Ligature". See the OpenType
specification document for Hebrew at:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otfntdev/hebrewot/features.aspx
When I make this change in the SFD source
file and recompile using fontforge, the problem is
fixed.
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