[tex-live] xdvipdfm seg faults when using some TTF fonts (Was xelatex on OpenBSD sparc64 - Bus Error)

[Jonathan Kew]

On 24 Jun 2007, at 11:30 pm, Edd Barrett wrote:

> Hi again,
>
> On 24/06/07, Jonathan Kew <jonathan_kew at sil.org> wrote:
>> Unless I'm misinterpreting things, the data here looks badly broken,
>> and that probably explains this crash.
>
> Wow..Yikes, I know nothing of this "kerning" of which you speak.
> Please excuse my lack of knowledge in this field. I am in fact quite
> new to TeX (I have used it for university assignments for about 2
> years). So it's a bad font?

It is, but it still shouldn't crash xetex. I've just been looking at  
the ICU code and have concluded that there is indeed a bug here: it  
reads longword values from addresses that might not be 4-byte  
aligned, and this will bus-error on some platforms (of which sparc is  
one).

So I'll give you a patch for this (tomorrow), and also report it  
upstream to the ICU project. That should prevent the crash, though  
the font is still incorrect (and so the kerning probably won't be  
applied as intended).

>
>> But it doesn't explain the
>> xdvipdfmx crash, as that program doesn't read the 'kern' data.
>
> This was the i386 crash. Do you need any more information regarding
> this / whats next?

I'll move on to that shortly....

JK