Support for Unicode combining characters is broken in gnome-terminal,
and text appears to be corrupted, giving incorrect information to the
reader!

For instance,

$ printf "a\u0305e\n"
a̅e

(Warning with the output you're seeing in the mail message: Debian's
BTS is known to occasionally corrupt non-ASCII characters.)

In gnome-terminal, this appears as "a" followed by an overlined "e"
instead of an overlined "a" followed by "e".

Combining characters apply to the previous character, not to the
following one.

http://unicode.org/faq/char_combmark.html

reassign 677513 ttf-bitstream-vera 1.10-8
retitle 677513 Combining diacritics out of place
thanks

According to

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ttf-liberation/+bug/299158

this is a font problem, because it occurs only with some fonts
(most monospace ones), and after some testing, I confirm.

clone 677513 -1 -2
reassign -1 fonts-liberation 1.07.2-5
reassign -2 fonts-droid 20111207+git-1
thanks

$ printf "a\u0301e\n" > foo
$ gedit foo

and test various fonts.

The problem occurs in:
VeraMono.ttf: "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono" "Roman"
LiberationMono-Regular.ttf: "Liberation Mono" "Regular"
DroidSansMono.ttf: "Droid Sans Mono" "Regular"

But for the last two, the accent appears after the first character
and before the second one.

Version: 1.07.4-1

Hi,

this has been fixed with upstream release 1.07.4, now in Debian unstable
and testing.

I'm closing this now, feel free to reopen if you experience it again.

Cheers,
Francesca

*Argh* wrong bug number (and same title...).
Please ignore my previous mail.

Reopening, sorry for the noise.

Cheers,
Francesca