I recently started using autohint because it looks much cooler. But now tildes in my konsole becomes a straight line like a hyphen. It only occur on Vera fonts (sans, sans mono, and serif) at 9pt or below. All other fonts are rendered correctly. If you turn the size up to 10pt, it renders correctly too. A googling reveals another incident on Debian: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2003/05/msg03608.html (at the very end of the message) So I believe it's a bitstream or fontconfig/freetype problem. Workaround: Turn off autohinter at small sizes. I tried every other thing (hinting off, antialias off, etc.). Same results. Turning off autohint seems to be the only way. If you have the bytecode interpreter turned off (bindist), oops too bad. No workaround. Have to make sure your tildes are of size 10pt or above. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. type tilde (~) 2. change size to 9pt, font to any of the 3 Bitstream Vera fonts 3. The tilde becomes a hyphen :-( Actual Results: long hyphen (like an underscore in the middle) Expected Results: tilde (~) I'm using: freetype-2.1.5-r1 fontconfig-2.2.2 xorg-x11-6.7.0-r1 emerge info Portage 2.0.50-r8 (default-x86-1.4, gcc-3.3.3, glibc-2.3.2-r8, 2.6.7-gentoo-r5) ================================================================= System uname: 2.6.7-gentoo-r5 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) XP 1800+ Gentoo Base System version 1.5.1 distcc 2.14 i686-pc-linux-gnu (protocols 1 and 2) (default port 3632) [disabled] Autoconf: sys-devel/autoconf-2.59-r4 Automake: sys-devel/automake-1.8.5-r1 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86 ~x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -mmmx -msse -m3dnow -O2 -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-strength-reduce -pipe" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" COMPILER="gcc3" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3.2/share/config /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/lib/mozilla/defaults/pref /usr/share/config /usr/share/texmf/dvipdfm/config/ /usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/platex/config/ /usr/share/texmf/xdvi/ /var/qmail/control" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/terminfo /etc/env.d" CXXFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -mmmx -msse -m3dnow -O2 -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-strength-reduce -pipe" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoaddcvs ccache digest sandbox" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://mirrors.tds.net/gentoo http://mirror.tucdemonic.org/gentoo/ http://gentoo.llarian.net/ http://gentoo.chem.wisc.edu/gentoo/ http://gentoo.ccccom.com" MAKEOPTS="-j2" PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage" SYNC="rsync://rsync.namerica.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="3dnow 3ds X X509 Xaw3d aac acpi acpi4linux adns aim alsa apache2 arts artswrappersuid async auctex audiofile avi berkdb bonobo cddb cdf cdr cgi chroot cjk clamav clanJavaScript clanVoice crypt curl devfs26 devmap dga directfb dnd doc dvd emacs encode esd evms2 evo faac faad fam fastcgi fbcon fbdev ffmpeg flac flash fluidsynth foomaticdb foreign-package freetype fs gb gd gdbm geoip ggi gif ginac glut gmp gmttria gnome gnomedb gnuplot gpm gstreamer gtk gtk2 gtkhtml guile hbci hdf hdf5 icq imagemagick imap imlib imlib2 inetd innodb java javascript jbig jdepend jikes jp2 jpeg jython kde kerberos krb4 ladcca lcms ldap leim lesstif libg++ libgda libwww lufsusermount mad maildir mailwrapper makecheck matroska mcal md5sum mdb mikmod mldonkeypango mmap mmx mng mono motif mozdomi mozilla mozp3p mozsvg mpeg mpeg4 mplayer msn mule music mysql nagios-ping nas native ncurses net netcdf nls nowin nptl ntlm oav ocaml odbc oggvorbis ooo-kde openal opengl openssh oscar oss pam parse-clocks pcre pda pdflib pear-db perl php physfs pic plotutils png portaudio posix ppds propolice psyco pthreads pwdb python qemu-fast qt quicktime quotes readline recode regexp ruby sasl sdl session shared skey slang sndfile soap sockets sox speex spell spl sqlite sse ssl svg svga sysvipc szip t1lib tcltk tcpd tetex theora tidy tiff timidity transcode truetype type1 uim unicode usb utf8 virus-scan wmf wsconvert wxwin wxwindows x86 xfs xine xml xml2 xmlrpc xmms xosd xprint xsl xv xvid yahoo zlib"
it's a autohint problem alright, but it's more of an upstream thing.
Problem gone with latest packages. Tested on KDE Konsole with Bitstream Vera Mono 9pt and tilde works now. Not sure exactly which version of which package fixed the problem. But here's a known working combination: clement@bubble ~ $ etcat -v ttf-bitstream-vera [ Results for search key : ttf-bitstream-vera ] [ Candidate applications found : 2 ] Only printing found installed programs. * media-fonts/ttf-bitstream-vera : [ ] 1.10-r2 (0) [M I] 1.10-r3 (0) clement@bubble ~ $ etcat -v fontconfig [ Results for search key : fontconfig ] [ Candidate applications found : 2 ] Only printing found installed programs. * media-libs/fontconfig : [ ] 2.2.2 (1.0) [ I] 2.2.3 (1.0) clement@bubble ~ $ etcat -v freetype [ Results for search key : freetype ] [ Candidate applications found : 4 ] Only printing found installed programs. * media-libs/freetype : [ ] 1.3.1-r3 (1) [ I] 1.3.1-r4 (1) [ ] 2.1.5-r1 (2) [ I] 2.1.9-r1 (2)
