Hi Fred, your patch is fantastic! Most everything works out of the box and the text looks really smooth with subpixel positioning. (No more autohinting, yay!) Even letterspacing works as before. I posted your patch to the tracker, please attach updated versions there.

Here are the issues (all of the below is on Linux; I'll try to build it on Windows later today and report results in a separate message):

1. Convert to path distorts lettershapes. I attached a sample to the patch tracker. Compare the red "a" (path) with underlying black "a" (glyph). Looks like all bezier control points became closer to the nodes.

2. Some fonts are badly distorted. I attach (also in the tracker) one such font that is used in the same lettershape-distortions.svg. When converted to path, however, these distortions disappear, although the resulting path is still wrong as described in 1. above.

3. I see you disabled all the fuzzy font matching and name parsing code in nr-type-fontdirectory. Do you think it will be difficult to reenable it with your code? I have written a good deal of that file so I could now try to reenable it. Any hints you might give are welcome.

4. Kerning pairs in fonts still don't work. I thought Pango would provide that automatically - or is some additional support needed?

5. Symbol fonts still don't work. When I select Symbol font in the list, I get

** (inkscape:25358): WARNING **: Unable to load unicode charmap from font file /home/d/.fonts/SYMBOL.TTF

** (inkscape:25358): WARNING **: Unable to open font file /home/d/.fonts/SYMBOL.TTF for font Symbol 512, falling back to /usr/share/fonts/console8x8.pcf.gz

** (inkscape:25358): WARNING **: Error in FT_Set_Char_Size: 23

Haven't yet checked Hebrew or Arabic. Is right-to-left supposed to work now? If not what is needed to make it work?

_________________________________________________________________ http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-ca&page=byoa/prem&xAPID=1994&DI...