Package: ttf-bitstream-vera Version: 1.10-3 Severity: important
After installing the ttf-bitstream-vera font package, I find that X gives a "could not init fontpath element" error message for the TrueType fonts. This appears to be caused by faulty fonts.dir and fonts.scale files created in /var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType directory; they have blanks instead of underscores in the XLFDs for the Bitstream fonts. The blanks make X barf when it tries to set up these fonts. I have inspected the defoma hintfile installed with the Bitstream package. It gives the font families as Bitstream-Vera-Sans, Bitstream-Vera-Serif, etc., which is (I think) reasonable. Probably the problem could be avoided for *this* font by changing the hyphens to underscores; but it seems to me the X utilities ought to be written to handle such cases gracefully, rather than making everybody who packages a font worry about replacing (normal) hyphens with (ugly) underscores in the defoma hintfiles. That's why I'm also filing this bug against xutils (which provides mkfontdir) and xbase-clients (the package that provides mkfontscale). It may turn out that both these programs use some common xlib function to parse fontnames and font-family names, in which case this bug should be reassigned to the appropriate package. Note, by the way, that defoma's Defoma::Id module correctly handles these fonts, installing XLFD names with underscores in the /var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/id-cache file. A further complication is that Bug 219854 says that TrueType fonts should be using mkttfdir rather than mkfontdir, and that a bug report should be filed against font packages that violate this. This is evidently the case with the Bitstream font package; I see my system doesn't even have the fttools package installed, which should have been a dependency of the font package if it had used mkttfdir. Therefore, this report is filed against the font package. It remains to be seen whether mkttfdir handles font-family names containing hyphens correctly.... -- Package-specific info: Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold | Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed |/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad) ||/ Name Version Description +++-==============-==============-============================================ ii libfreetype6 2.1.7-2.4 FreeType 2 font engine, shared library files ii libxft2 2.1.7-1 FreeType-based font drawing library for X ii fontconfig 2.3.1-2 generic font configuration library -- System Information: Debian Release: 3.1 Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.4.27-2-k7 Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1) Versions of packages ttf-bitstream-vera depends on: ii defoma 0.11.8-0.1 Debian Font Manager -- automatic f -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
