[XeTeX] wrong glyphs with FreeSerif Italic

[Julian Bradfield]

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!