[Scribus] Re: Scribus crashes with some ghostscript .pfa fonts

[Craig Bradney]

Hi Javier,

> >> today I've chased down a absolutely odd crash (Segmentation fault while
> >> loading) on Scribus 1.1.5
> 
> >Not so odd. 
> 
> It seems it wasn't for someone who knows the internals of Scribus, but
> as an end user I didn't expect it to be something like that. I must say
> it was easy to fix, though.

Yes, sorry, I meant as a report on the mailing list or on IRC, its a
typical question.

> >> I'm using Qt 3.3.1, KDE 3.2 and kernel 2.6.4-rc2
> 
> >> The first thing I tried was recompiling wihout any kind of optimization
> >> (I use Gentoo), but that didn't help at all.
> 
> >Scribus can use O2 or O3
> 
> I have mine with Os right now, and without the naughty fonts everything
> seems alright.

Yes.. Os is also regularly used by one developer. As long as you dont go
too aggressive with other options there shouldn't be a problem at all.

> >> Thus I ended up stracing it (which I should have done in the first
> >> place), and I saw it crashed while opening some fonts I had on
> >> /usr/share/fonts/default/ghostscript
> 
> >Typical problem
> 
> I see...
> 
> >> http://www.marcet.info/files/ghostscript-crashing.tar.bz2
> 
> >Hershey fonts.. a typical buggy font.  Forget it.
> 
> >> The fonts come from the ghostscript distribution.
> >> You can find the original archive on:
> >> ftp://ftp.easysw.com/pub/ghostscript/gnu-gs-fonts-other-6.0.tar.gz
> 
> >> P.S If they don't make Scribus crash for you, do you have any idea about
> >> what might be the reason for it to crash here?
> 
> >Yes, they do. They are bad fonts. My suggestion is to use CVS because we
> 
> Now that I can use it I'll probably wait for the next release. Or is
> there anything worth it to build from CVS? I'm mostly using PDF output.

The Changelog is online at www.scribus.net. There are many fixes and
updates as we are heading towards 1.2. There will not be a new release
for over a month from now, unless we do end up releasing a 1.1.6 or
1.2RC. The 1.2CVS Changelog is on www.scribus.net if you want to keep up
to date with the changes.

> >now handle buggy fonts better than before (skips them and you cant use
> >them in Scribus) although I'm not sure it handles the Hershey ones yet.
> 
> This is indeed better, since a segmentation fault is not what an end
> user should find...

No, but even though we now handle the freetype library better (since 3rd
March in CVS), it does not provide the required font checking. Right now
in my testing Scribus still segfaults with Hershey fonts installed and
AFAIK there are not too many more things we can do for checking in the
fonts until freetype itself handles this. Hopefully we can find a way to
avoid this. We were thinking of a font blacklist that was written to on
crash but its still unfriendly. Of course by default the blacklist would
include Hershey.

> >Your best option is to remove them.
> 
> So in your opinion I better remove that package of fonts altogether?

Yes. Although just removing Hershey might get you around the issue but
remember whenever that gets reemerged they will be back to haunt your
system. The only fonts seperate from Xfree that I have emerged are
urw-fonts and ttf-bitstream-vera. All my other fonts come from a Corel
set of 1000 fonts I own and are all good quality. 

I have spoken to spyderous - Donnie Berkholz (?)  (the guy who maintains
Gentoo's XFree ) about those Hershey fonts before and we did discuss
removing them from Gentoos distribution because of the issues in general
with Hershey. Not sure whatever came of that. 

regards
Craig
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