[Fontconfig] Italics slope in wrong direction

[Keith Packard]

Around 15 o'clock on Jun 5, Dale Mellor wrote:

> I don't know if the problem is with fontconfig or elsewhere, but in Mozilla
> (any version from 1.3 upwards), all renderings of the serif font (looks
> like times roman) slant the characters in the vertical direction instead of
> the horizontal!

You've got a buggy version of FreeType installed -- get 2.1.4 or later.  
That version of FreeType helpfully "reinterprets" the order of values 
within the transformation matrix yielding buggy output.

The reason you see the problem only with the Vera Serif font is that there 
is no oblique varient of that face and fontconfig is synthesizing one by 
slanting the roman face using the (broken) matrix.

-keith