[XeTeX] wrong glyphs with FreeSerif Italic

[Zdenek Wagner]

2013/12/27 Julian Bradfield <jcb+xetex at jcbradfield.org>:
> On 2013-12-27, Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 26, 2013 at 02:36:55PM +0000, Julian Bradfield wrote:
>>> My xelatex version is
>>> This is XeTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.3-0.9997.5 (TeX Live 2011) (format=xelatex 20
>>> 12.11.27)
>>
>> There was a problem with old versions of XeTeX (probably < 0.9998) where
>> having two different versions of the same font can lead to XeTeX using
>> one to typeset the document while dvipdfmx is using the other to
>> generate the PDF, which can lead to the shifted glyphs issue you see.
>
> Thank you very much! That was indeed the problem.
> There were a bunch of 2010 Freefont files in the texmf directory,
> while I'd put the 2012 files in the system directory.
> I hadn't realized the old files were there.
> After removing them, all is well.
>
> I understand kpathsea, but learning the interactions with fontconfig
> is still to come!
>
If you need newer version of fonts than that distributed with TeX
Live, you should remove the fonts from TeX Live. You can find my
questions in the TeX Live list. The behaviour was so weird that no one
was able to help me and finally I solved it myself. I configured
fontconfig to use first fonts from my directory tree and then from TeX
Live. It worked fine on my home computer but not on my office
computer. After forced removal of the TeX Live fonts from the office
computer it started to work. After updating some packages (TeX Live
does not update binaries) it ceased to work on my home computer, I had
to remove the TeX Live fonts. The moral is that even XeTeX in TeX Live
2013 does not always obey the search order configured in fontconfig
and it is unpredictable and unreproducible.
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz