[XeTeX] wrong glyphs with FreeSerif Italic

[Khaled Hosny]

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.

The easiest solution is to search the system for different copies of the
font and making sure that only one version is accessible to XeTeX. Some
thing like this should list all fonts with "free" in file name:

  fc-list --format="%{file}\n" | grep -i free

Upgrading to the latest TeX Live should help as well (but generally it
is a good idea to make sure only one version of any font is available to
applications).

Regards,
Khaled