On 5/29/06, Richard Hughes <cyreve@...400...> wrote:

...

The problem is that now it crashes as soon as you open the drop-down in the text toolbar, because of auto previews. Previously it only crashed if you clicked specifically on that font in Font dialog list. So now Inkscape _seems_ much more crashy. And judging by the number of the reports, this is going to be a really major problem.

Pango appears to have been tweaked in 1.11.3 and above to make this a non-fatal error (http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/pango/pango/shape.c?r1=1.12&r2=1.13). The comments seem to indicate that the font will look ugly, but that's much better than taking all of Inkscape down.

I agree with Bulia about the severity of this problem, and would strongly argue that Pango is upgraded (probably to 1.12.3) for pre1 so we can get some testing to make sure the newer version is good.

Thanks a lot Richard for a comprehensive response - I didn't expect the answer so fast :)

Ishmal, can you please prepare a new libraries bundle with this version of Pango? Thanks!

pango-1.12.3.zip gtk+-2.8.18.zip

Yep, this stops it dying horribly in the font selector. Instead it just shows a whole row of those 'no glyph' boxes (I'm testing with GeoType TT from bug 1474337).

I've just checked in a fix to stop things crashing when you actually try to render some canvas text with one of the dodgy fonts, but it's still not great. It falls back to Sans for the rasterisation but Pango is still using the extents and character-to-glyph mapping from the real font (which it has failed to read hence are all zeros), so you end up with the wrong characters all on top of each other. But it doesn't crash.

It would be better to detect fonts that aren't going to work earlier so that we can do the entire render with Sans, but that's kind of awkward because we don't know the font that Pango's going to choose until too late. Anyway, this way we get a very visible reminder that it would be nice to fix Pango.

Richard.

Bryce Harrington wrote:

For what it's worth, I estimate we're only a few days from being to Hard Freeze, so whatever solution is chosen, it needs to be done expediently. I agree with that this is more critical than we'd expected, due to the number of bug reports. If the feature needs to be disabled in order to avoid increasing Inkscape's crashiness, then that'd probably be a wise thing to do. Of course, eliminating the bug entirely (or even mostly) would be much preferred.

Bryce

Sounds good. I'm almost done. But please don't count today as one of your days, since some of us must maintain and operate barbecue grills today. :-)

bob