Pango: Issues with illegal characters in family names (encoding problems on Windows?)

[Eduard Braun <eduard braun2 gmx de>]

Hi all,

I'm a developer in the Inkscape project which uses Pango/Fontconfig to 
render (and also query) available fonts on the system.

In the past there were multiple bug reports [2,3] about Inkscape 
crashing due to fonts with illegal characters in their family name 
(Inkscape queries them with "pango_ft2_font_map_new()" and 
"pango_font_map_list_families()" respectively and gets the name with 
"pango_font_family_get_name()", see [3] for details).

I recently pushed a fix [4] which seems to avoid the crashes and proves, 
that they are caused by font family names containing illegal UTF-8 
characters!

The question I'm asking myself is, whether
a) the font files themselves are invalid and contain characters in some 
broken encoding
b) fontconfig has issues querying fonts with special characters on 
Windows, or
c) Pango does something wrong when passing the list to Inkscape

As I have not nearly enough knowledge about Pango/Fontconfig (or font 
formats to start with) I hope that somebody is able to figure out what 
is going wrong and if it can be fixed somehow!

As a start you can find two fonts that caused crashes in the past at [5] 
and [6] and according to user reports the fix in [4] prevents them both 
(while obviously making it impossible to use the font).

Best Regards,
Eduard Braun


[1]https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1495386
[2]https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1508928
[3] 
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~inkscape.dev/inkscape/trunk/view/head:/src/libnrtype/FontFactory.cpp
[4] http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~inkscape.dev/inkscape/trunk/revision/15687
[5] 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1495386/+attachment/4875733/+files/AESYSMAT.zip
[6] 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1508928/+attachment/4502390/+files/%E9%87%91%E6%A2%85%E6%AF%9B%E8%A1%8C%E6%9B%B8.ttf