[XeTeX] Problem with Unicode 01F01B

mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca
Wed Dec 19 15:56:16 CET 2012


On Wed, 19 Dec 2012, Steve White wrote:
> Mahjong Tiles
> =============
>
> The glyphs in question, in the Mahjong Tiles range U+1f000 - U+1f02b
> are indeed very complicated.  I personally spent a lot of time cleaning
> the glyphs up, and arranging for simpler representation.  Still some of
> them contain the largest number of nodes of any glyph in the whole font.
>
> I wouldn't be at all surprised that they would cause some software to trip up.
>
> It appears, however, we still don't know what in the font causes the trip.

The "too many hstemh hints" problem (that is a description of what's going
on, not an exact error message - the exact error message is "Stack got too
big," with some additional consequences related to incorrect widths) is
caused by whatever software saved the file saving more hints than the
specification allows.  It's not really caused by the glyphs being
complicated and the reader "tripping up," but by the *writer* writing
incorrect values when the glyphs are complicated and certain other
conditions are met.  The data is actually bad, not just big; if some
readers don't report an error it is because they are less watchful than
they should be.

FontForge was patched for it almost exactly a year ago, discussion here:

   http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=28442724

If the font file in question was created with a version of FontForge older
than the patch, it should be re-saved with a newer version.  If it was
created with some other software, at least that discussion may provide
some clues on what needs to be fixed in the other software.

-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                 People before principles.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/


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