[cairo] Text rendering questions

[Ian Britten]

Behdad Esfahbod wrote:

>>> What should I expect regarding the specified (FT) font?  Should it
>>> always be used?  When my Regular text is drawn using an Italic
>>> font, or my Bold text is drawn using a Regular font (And it's very
>>> intermittent/inconsistent), I'm left scratching my head...

[ snip ]

> All I can suggest is that you check with 1.8.0 and if the problem resists,
> come back and we'll try to debug it.

Ok, I finally got a test VM set up, using cairo 1.8.0 (and cairomm
1.7.0, and FT 2.3.7), and I'm still seeing the same
intermittently-incorrect font being used.

[ As well, my text is still an incorrect size, but I'm willing to
defer that for now, to focus on just one problem at a time... ]

Any suggestions about how I might proceed (given I know nothing
about the internals of Cairo)?  One difficulty is that I don't
have a consistently-reproducible test case showing the problem,
which will probably make debugging this ... unpleasant  :(

Meanwhile, my first approach will probably involve trying to
figure out where Cairo finally outputs a specific font, and
try to print out meaningful information (And then somehow try
to correlate that with what I passed in)

>> [ My size problem remains, and seems unchanged by any of this ]
> 
> No idea about the size.  Maybe you are using bitmap fonts?

No.  In this case, they're mostly the Arial TT font(s) from
msttcorefonts  (Regular, Bold, Italic, etc)

Ian