Problem with Kerning

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Hello list

A few months ago I wrote about mis-shaped glyphs (about which noone was able 
to help).  I recently found out that the feta font itself is borked on my 
Gentoo system (and I discovered the same errors in Debian Squeeze’s), both are 
2.12.3 I think.  So I installed lilypond in my virtual Ubuntu; I know this 
looks right because a friend uses it.

But alas, I had to discover thusly that the Ubuntu-lilypond doesn’t do kerning 
as nicely as my Gentoo setup.  I am using TeX Gyre as default font, because 
it’s a little nicer to look at.  Interestingly, the Gentoo-version has simple 
ttf files of the font, whereas in Ubuntu the Gyre package installed a set of 
otf files.

If I use the default lilypond CM font, the result looks the same for the two 
systems, so the problem seems to be with how lilypond (or the underlying text 
renderer) digests the external font.

See the attached minimal example and screenshots thereof for the difference:
- the space between W and a in Water
- the space between T and r in Translated
- the space between T and . in S.A.T.B.


PS about the borked font issue:
I copied all files in /usr/share/lilypond/2.12.3/fonts/ from Ubuntu over to 
Gentoo and naturally the latter renders well now. But when comparing the two 
version of, for instance, type1/feta18.pfb in a font viewer, I noticed that 
the Gentoo version show slightly less spacing between some glyhps.
Could that be related, since on Gentoo the fonts are freshly compiled during 
installation?


Thanks for any help here, even if it’s just for learning a bit about 
lilypond’s internals, since the above workaround fixed the problem which 
“drove” me to Ubuntu in the first place.

-- 
Gruß | Greetings | Qapla'
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fonts-gentoo.png
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fonts-ubuntu.png
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mini.ly
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