[Pkg-fonts-devel] GNU FreeFont 20120503 released

[Steve White]

Hi Christian and Fabian,

I wanted to apprise you of a recent change to FreeType, that will have
some effect on FreeFont sometime soon.

It only affects FreeMono, and (I think) only in the accuracy with
which the letters are spaced.

The deal is, due to a disagreement between people working on
FontForge, regarding the interpretation of
the standards, a flag is turned off.  This used to only affect Windows
applications, but now it affects Linux too.
I built the font with a modified version of FontForge, which (I
believe correctly) sets the flag.
I submitted the patch to FontForge, and expected it would be implemented soon.
But others have objected (for reasons whose explanation still escapes
me).   So the patch isn't in.

It isn't a *big* deal, but it will mean your built binaries will be
different from the ones in the FreeFont release
in this regard, and in some applications will behave differently.
Under FreeType with patches from 2011-04-21,
the built versions of FreeMono will not render as well as the binaries
downloaded from the FreeFont site,
because FontForge will not have set this flag.

I'm thinking of other options, but nothing looks easy at this point.

Cheers!