[Pkg-fonts-devel] 20090104 release of GNU FreeFont

[Steve White]

Davide

I have a lot of questions about your procedure.  It is very
interesting to me--I would love such a direct way to see a change.

However, let me re-state: the version of FreeFont currently in Debian
experimental has been
withdrawn, due to a licensing problem.  Please do not leave it there.
Whatever the meaning of this difference, it appears to be invisible to
my eyes.  Such a difference is less important than a licensing issue.

Also, again, I don't think anything changed regarding these Indic
ranges since the last release, including global changes.   The changes
were very limited (check for yourself in the CVS log).

But let's try to figure out what happened.
My questions:

1) It escapes me how these stripping scripts would have any impact on
such experiments.
    What makes you think they would?

2) I have been unable to find instructions on how to reproduce your
PNGs, and their diff.
    Please give me a step-by-step.  Specifically, please clarify how you:
    -- render the text
    -- make the diff between the PNGs

3) What versions of FreeFont are represented in deb_hi.png and hi.png?
 (One must be
    FreeFont 20090104, but what is the other?)

    If the other is some older version of FreeFont, the Indic ranges
may well have been
    subject to small alterations (their outlines had multiple little
problems that had to be
    cleaned up).

I put all three PNGs side-by-side, to try to see what parts of what
glyphs were affected.
Assuming the diff is geometrically aligned with the rendered text, I
searched for the first diff.
I just used a piece of paper to measure on my screen.  I see the bit
of the glyph that shows up
in the diff, in BOTH PNGs.  No visible difference.  Checked several
places.  It looks like any
difference must be in pixel color...

Without understanding the above items, I would have to suggest that
the apparent problem is due to the font samples being rendered
slightly differently.  This could result from the PNGs being produced
under different versions of the rendering libraries, or from the font
rendering configuration changing between renderings.

This leads us to a next question:

4) Were the PNGs rendered at about the same time with exactly the same
version of
    software on the same machine, or did some time elapse between renderings?

Cheers!