Font problem - special characters sometimes displayed incorrectly

lastchancetosee · 2011-01-15 12:14:10

I have a problem with the fonts installed on my computer: With some of them special characters (mainly german umlauts) get replaced by other fairly random symbols. My first guess was broken fonts, but the behaviour is completely inconsistent: In some apps they are displayed correctly, in some not, sometimes it even changes within one app:

Screenshot, wrong symbols marked red, correct symbols marked green.

Note that Exaile consistently displays them wrongly, while Pidgin does alright in the buddy list but screws up in the conversation window [edit: See below] and Audacious behaves differently even within one window! Adding to this the behaviour changes depending on the font. Most fonts are alright (so far all default fonts are, but not all installed later (manually or via pacman) are faulty), within the faulty ones it depends on the font which apps work and which don't, e.g. Bauhaus will work perfectly except that the Pidgin conversations can't display '€', Santana works for Audacious, but fails completely in Pidgin and Exaile, while Petita (the one from the screenshot) is all over the place. In some cases one font package contains different weights of the same font and those will behave completely differently.

All kinds of text editors work fine with all kinds of fonts, so do all file managers I tested.

Any idea as to what might be the source of this problem? How can one app interpret one ttf-file differently depending on where it uses it?

[edit: I was mistaken: Pidgin screws up consistently in all it's windows. It's just inconsistent with other apps: In the screenshot for example 'ü' in Pidgin works, 'ä' and 'ö' don't, in Exaile all three don't. This is insane!]

Last edited by lastchancetosee (2011-01-15 12:21:21)

thisoldman · 2011-01-15 16:06:32

I downloaded the Petita font by Manfred Klein and checked the mapping with Fontforge. Fontforge is reporting many, many errors with the mapping to Unicode, such as,

The glyph named breve is mapped to U+0005.
 But its name indicates it should be mapped to U+02D8.

Most likely, the fonts with the errors were designed for a different operating system.

Last edited by thisoldman (2011-01-15 16:06:49)

lastchancetosee · 2011-01-15 17:51:56

You live and learn - I wasn't aware that there were compatibility issues in TrueType. Isn't this supposed to be a Standard?

But that would certainly explain a lot. Strange though that the behaviour should be so different in the different applications.

Arch Linux

#1 2011-01-15 12:14:10

Font problem - special characters sometimes displayed incorrectly

#2 2011-01-15 16:06:32

Re: Font problem - special characters sometimes displayed incorrectly

#3 2011-01-15 17:51:56

Re: Font problem - special characters sometimes displayed incorrectly

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