Kerning-problem with pango

[hadmut danisch de (Hadmut Danisch)]

Hi,

I have a problem with font kerning in pango: It does not do the
kerning for some fonts. It still seems to be the same problem as
reported for gimp in bug 316586, but did some more tests to track this
down. Maybe someone more experienced with pango internals could help
debugging. 

As a test case I rendered the word 'Test' (the bounding boxes of 'T'
and 'e' should overlap):



- The problem occurs with inkscape, rsvg, gimp, libpango1-ruby, 
  but not with scribus or the freetype test tool ftstring. The latter
  two do use freetype, but not pango. 


- The problem occurs with some fonts only. E.g. the testscript at the 
  end of this mail renders the "Sans" font (which is actually
  DejaVu-Sans.ttf on my Debian system) with kerning, but the "Arial"
  font without kerning, although that font definitely has
  kerning. (It is the Microsoft arial.ttf fron WinXP, ttf is 151232
  bytes long.)


- The problem is not specific to my machine. Several readers of the
  inkscape mailing list confirmed the problem, while other's didn't. 

  Today I tried to reproduce the problem on a Ubuntu machine, but
  there the kerning worked. Same font file.



Any idea?


regards
Hadmut

The ruby test program:

require 'gtk2'

Gtk.init

str = <<ENDE
<span size="300000" face="Sans">Test</span>
<span size="300000" face="Arial">Test</span>
ENDE
attrs, text, accel_char = Pango.parse_markup(str, '$')

label = Gtk::Label.new(text)
label.attributes = attrs

Gtk::Window.new.add(label).show_all

Gtk.main