I used to run Freetype with antialiasing disabled, since I prefer the sharp rendering obtained when the bytecode hinter is enabled, but I was getting fed up with Courier New for monospaced fonts, and started looking for an alternative. Unfortunately, I found nothing that had decent hinting, so I decided to disable bytecode hinting and start using antialiasing instead. In the following hours, X froze multiple times, something it had never done before. At first, I wasn't sure what to blame; it didn't occur to me that something as innocent as the antialiasing could cause it, until I found a way to reproduce the hang with 100% accuracy.
All you need is a webpage with a lot of clean text, such as this, http://grid.uio.no/hrk/cdward.html then start resizing the text up and down like crazy. I found it easiest to use Firefox for this, since you can resize by keeping Ctrl pressed while scrolling the mouse wheel rapidly back and forth. It never takes me more than 5 seconds to make X freeze. Once it happens, the mouse cursor can move around, but it can't interact with anything. My machine is still alive though; I can log in remotely and kill X to restore control, but it's impossible to do anything about it from my local keyboard/mouse, since that's under X's control. I tried using a couple of different fonts, such as Arial and Bitstream Vera Serif, and it didn't make any difference: Crashes no matter which font I use. Here's my ~/.fonts.conf: <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd"> <fontconfig> <match target="font"> <edit name="antialias" mode="assign"> <bool>true</bool> </edit> </match> </fontconfig> When I set "antialias" to false, I can never crash the system, so it's perfectly clear that this option causes it. I assume it is the Freetype library that handles the antialiasing, even though the above config file belongs to fontconfig, and that's why I'm posting the bug report here. My distro is Slackware 10.1, and the most relevant software versions are: linux 2.6.11 (x86) fontconfig 2.2.3 freetype 2.1.9 x.org 6.8.2 glibc 2.3.4 gtk 2.6.7 firefox 1.0.4 mozilla 1.8a6 Can anyone but me reproduce this? I found it strange that such a critical and easily triggered problem would go unnoticed (didn't find anything in the archives, nor Google Groups). -- Haakon _______________________________________________ Freetype mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype
