[cairo] cairo or pango drawing "wrong" alternative glyphs

[Arjen Nienhuis]

Hi,

I use a font with many alternative glyphs: it has many different forms
for the same letter. It's this font: http://www.sudtipos.com/fonts/2
(It's called Affair)

Now with the version of cairo+pango that come with Ubuntu 12.04 the
font works but doesn't use the alternative glyphs. This is fine.

Now if I upgrade to the newer versions of Ubuntu or Debian it starts
to use the alternative glyphs. But it does so in an apparently random
way and this makes the text unreadable.

I fixed this temporally by opening the font in FontForge and randomly
deleting GSUB stuff until it looked good again.

Is there another way to fix this? Maybe by setting some options from
cairo, or by upgrading to some latest git version of something?

Thanks in advance,
Arjen Nienhuis