R/Sweave/cairo/freetype bug fix.

On Mar 30, 2013, at 9:24 AM, Hin-Tak Leung wrote:

Perhaps that's too much details. There is (will be) a new freetype because of cairo's unanticipated usage (which R uses, among other cairo users). Most people should upgrade or request an upgrade eventually, when they are comfortable.

Which versions are affected? R binary for OS X uses freetype 2.4.11 (and cairo 1.12.14) so I just need to know if there is an action item.

Thanks,
SImon

--- On Sat, 30/3/13, peter dalgaard <pdalgd at gmail.com> wrote:

Huh?

This is utterly incomprehensible without reading the redhat
bugzilla, and even after reading, I'm not sure what the
issue is. Something with bold Chinese fonts in X11, but
maybe also affecting Latin fonts, ....?

Please explain yourself.

-pd

On Mar 30, 2013, at 09:25 , Hin-Tak Leung wrote:

The problem was first seen with R/Sweave (#c0) then

reproduced directly with cairo (#c10) and was eventually
traced to freetype. The 5-part bug fix:

610ee58e07090ead529849b2a454bb6c503b4995
da11e5e7647b668dee46fd0418ea5ecbc33ae3b2
e1a2ac1900f2f16ec48fb4840a6b7965a8373c2b
869fb8c49ddf292d6daf4826172a308973d3e11f
d56e544d653b09c657911629557ffc5277a503e3
was committed to freetype in January and will form the

next release (2.4.12). They were back ported to 2.4.11

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=891457#c35
and the redhat people had further back-ported it to

2.4.10 for fedora 18/19 (#c51).

The freetype people had reproduced the problem with a

latin font, so this affects most people, unlike what the
initial report (#c0) suggests.

Since freetype is part of X11, most unix/linux users

would be understandably nervous about breaking X (see #c45
for screenshot of broken gnome terminal!) and should wait up
to a year before the new and not-yet-released 2.4.12 becomes
an official upgrade; or contact their favourite unix vendors
and/or Apple for upgrades. AFAIK, current up-to-date linux
distributions ships the rather older 2.4.10, with the
exception of fedora 18/19 (#c51). Mac OS X 10.5 ships
freetype 2.3.5 as part of X11; I haven't bother looking up
later Mac OS X's.

The official R binaries for windows and mac OS X are

compiled against static libraries of cairo 1.10.2 (over 2
years old), and cairo 1.11.2 and freetype 2.4.4
respectively, and are firmly in the "do not work correctly"
category.

The long and short of the story is that R/Sweave uses a

feature of cairo which wasn't implemented before cairo
1.11.2 (#c13, Jan 2011), which in turn depends on a feature
of freetype that has been around since 2005 but did not
anticipate cairo's usage. It is commendable that the
freetype people did not refer to cairo's usage as "misuse"
but took the patience to address the problem, unlike some
group's style.

It has been an interesting few months returning to

freetype after about 17 years, I think.

Here is how to look up what version of freetype -

libfreetype.so.x.y.z for most unix platforms, and
/usr/X11/lib/libfreetype.x.y.z.dylib on Mac OS X:

(excerpt from docs/VERSION.DLL)

     version   

x.y.z   date of release

     2.4.11 

   6.10.0  Dec 2012

     2.4.10 

   6.9.0   June 2012

     2.4.9     

6.8.1   March 2012

...
     2.4.4     

6.6.2   Nov 2010  (official R mac
binaries)

...
     2.3.5     

6.3.16  July 2007 (Mac OS X 10.5)

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-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk 
Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com