[Fontconfig] libxft2 kerning difficulty

[Dan Egnor]

Thanks for the quick followup.

> I don't see any actual problems with the glyphs shown; ...

I'm surprised you'd say that.  As it stands, I can't render them
consistently without text frequently abutting, which looks just terrible.

Suppose I just want to find out the physical width of the actual ink -- 
how many actual pixels wide the glyph is.  As you can see in my examples, 
the .width field of the extents structure is not accurate in this regard.  
I'm reduced to rendering to a bitmap and scanning the actual pixels just 
so I can line up text without neighboring characters literally smashing 
into each other.  

Surely there's a better way?

The "wandering hot spot" is also a major problem, which again I can
only solve by scanning pixels.  I'm not sure these can easily be 
described as "rounding" issues, especially since the glyphs themselves 
render very nicely.

Is it worth it for me to start digging into the code, or maybe learning
the freetype APIs to address the root of the problem there?

> I'd be interested to know if you've got the byte code interpreter
> enabled; ...

How would I tell?  I've installed the Debian packages and haven't 
made any other tweaks.  The only thing I do to the font is turn off
antialiasing.

Dan