Fonts, Swashes, Linux, Problems

I recently bought a font called Jolie Romantique (for a future, er, project), and it worked without any problems: I plopped the .ttf file into ~/.fonts, created an SVG file with some text in it, ran it through ImageMagick “convert” and got this:

Of special interest here is that end-of-word swash.  (That’s apparently the technical term for those things: Swashes.  I know.)

Here’s the SVG file:

<svg width="600" height="200" version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <rect width="600" height="200" x="0" y="0" fill="white"></rect> <text y="100" x="65" text-anchor="left" font-family="JRS" fill="black" stroke="black" font-weight="regular" font-size="120">Like#02</text> </svg>

Did you catch the fun bit?  Yes, it’s that “#02” in there.  The swashes are apparently implemented as ligatures or something, and they’re encoded in the font as #01, #02 and #03.  Here’s the same file with the #03 swash:

Fun!

Like I said, this worked perfectly…  on my Debian jessie machine.  Then I upgraded it to Debian stretch, and the swashes stopped working.  Now the results look like this:

This is sad.

And I have no idea where to report this bug.  It’s not a bug in imagemagick or the SVG libraries, because X programs (mis)behave the same way.  So it’s in the TTF rendering libraries?  What’s responsible for that?

I’ve tried googling for this, but the pickings are rather slim.  Apparently not too many people are that into swashing.

If I can’t get this fixed, I’ll have to set up an Emacs-as-a-Service thing on a jessie machine to create the images for my er project.  So, no biggie.  But! This should just, like work.  And it doesn’t.

I just tried this on Ubuntu 17.10, and it doesn’t work there, either.  So it’s a cross-platform bug, I guess?

Neil the Horse and the Big Banana

While tidying the basement, I found these tapes:

It’s an old radio show featuring Neil the Horse, originally broadcast on Canadian radio around 1982.

So I was like 14 at the time, and I was a major fan of the Neil the Horse comic book series by Arn Saba. I think there was an ad for the radio series in one of the issues, so I sent off for a copy. From Arn Saba personally?  Hm.  I don’t recall any more.

Anyway, Neil the Horse is making the world safe for musical comedy, and apparently this radio show is not available anywhere?  And since the comic book is finally re-released by Conundrum Press this year, I’m celebrating by uploading these tapes to Youtube.

(If anybody, especially Katherine Collins, objects, please let me know and I’ll remove them.)

[Edit: There’s a brand new interview with Katherine Collins up at tcj.com just a few hours after I posted this.]

The show’s in five parts:

Neil the Horse and the Big Banana (part 1)
Neil the Horse and the Big Banana (part 2)
Neil the Horse and the Big Banana (part 3)
Neil the Horse and the Big Banana (part 4)
Neil the Horse and the Big Banana (part 5)

Here’s the cast list: