Sat 10 Sep 2016 06:37:04 AM UTC, comment #2:
My main Windows machine has been down for a while, so I can conveniently see this only in a VM running Windows XP. I can confirm that MS ClearType, at least, shows this problme. Which version of Windows are you using?
In fact, the effect in Notepad is not simply to reverse the character width. It just goes crazy. Probably some other bad logic is involved.
These are all characters that contain rotated (not mirrored) references to other characters, and in each case the metrics of the references has been given the "use my metrics" flag.
This flag means the width of the character should be the same as that of the original. This is to ensure all the glyphs based on a single glyph to have the same width as the original -- e.g. all the glyphs with the letter 'e' would stay the same, even if the original were tweeked. It's very useful in some places.
This looks like a non-FreeFont bug. It's a bug in the font rendering software.
I could go through and uncheck all of these cases -- finding all of them would take some work. I don't think there's much harm in this, in itself, and I may yet do so. The usefulness of this feature for these few rotated letters is limited.
BUT. The bug is in the rendering software. This behavior is simply a mistake. I wonder if many of the products you mention aren't using the same rendering layer.
I'm surprised LibreOffice would behave this way even on Windows. I thoght it had its own font rendering layer. And I have yet to find anything running on Linux that behaves this way (including LibreOffice 5).
To make changes only changes in FreeFont, would not "fix" the bug. It would be to work around a bug in some other software. It would be to sweep the bug under the rug. Somebody should inform the right people.
Thanks for pointing this out, David!
Let me know what you think!
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