[tlbuild] Problems with xdvipdmfx (at least) and some fonts

[Norbert Preining]

Dear all,

Included in Cc: Valek Filippov, the creator of the URWcyr fonts,
Fabian Greffrath and Lucas Nussbaum from Debian, who are in one
way or another involved.

I want to report a problem we are facing here at Debian. 
It does happen with upstream as-is TeX Live, too, but it needs
one change, namely that the URW++ fonts are replaced with the
fonts that are shipped in Debian, which are enriched with 
Cyrillic glyphs, aka URWcyr as developed by Valek. These fonts have
been distributed in former times by GNOME, as far as I see, but now
I cannot find them but in the Debian repository:
http://http.debian.net/debian/pool/main/g/gsfonts/gsfonts_8.11+urwcyr1.0.7~pre44.orig.tar.gz

I guess that many will stop here on the spot, and I accept this.
I am strongly opposing and trying to fix this in Debian, but be it as
it is, we have these fonts here.

So what happens is that a minimal non-working exmaple for xlatex:
	\documentclass{article}
	\usepackage{fontspec}
	\setmainfont{Nimbus Roman No9 L}
	\begin{document}
	Hello World
	\end{document}
produces:
* on Debian with the URW+cyrillic fonts
	complete gibberish (see attached screenshot 1 - debian.png)
* on upstream TeX Live with URW+cyrillic fonts
  (done by doing --no-pdf to xelatex, and then xdvipdfmx -v to see the
  fonts used)
	correct letters, but broken spacing 
	(see attached screenshot 2 - upstream.png)
* on both Debian and upstream TeX Live with the *original* URW++ fonts
	correct output

I want to mention that the Debian sources are based on the released TL2015
sources, just compiled dynamically. I can provide details if this is
necessary.

Why I am contacting tlbuild is that the URW+cyrillic fonts have been 
used for many many years in Debian, and there was never a problem with
the fonts. Only recently - I guess with the merge of all the *dvipdfm*
programs, this behaviour appeared. So there might be an actual bug
lurking around.

Thanks a lot for any hints and suggestions

Norbert

------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREINING, Norbert                               http://www.preining.info
JAIST, Japan                                 TeX Live & Debian Developer
GPG: 0x860CDC13   fp: F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0  ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: debian.png
Type: image/png
Size: 4777 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://tug.org/pipermail/tlbuild/attachments/20150821/063eb26e/attachment.png>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: upstream.png
Type: image/png
Size: 4865 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://tug.org/pipermail/tlbuild/attachments/20150821/063eb26e/attachment-0001.png>