Created attachment 5160 [details]
bug - see aaaa's and MaMaMa's

Submitted bug to the FreeFont team:
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?26187

Email thread:

I logged a FreeFont bug about the vertical alignment "MaMaMa" issue that I found.

I got a response today, which was basically "patches welcome", but gave some clues about the source, which led me to try disabling autohinting in freetype.

  *   FT_LOAD_NO_AUTOHINT ::
  *     Indicates that the auto-hinter should never be used to hint glyph
  *     outlines.  This doesn't prevent native format-specific hinters from
  *     being used.  This can be important for certain fonts where unhinted
  *     output is better than auto-hinted one.

This produces results that have a variety of not-unpleasant effects, one of which is to resolve the Ma problems. Below are examples. Oddly, it affects the overall width in different ways, sometimes lengthening and sometimes shortening by a small amount.

The autohint off vs on can best be seen if you bring both images up in something like Preview (where you can toggle back and forth between the images)
(though oddly sometimes when I do this in Preview, one of the images is overall more blurry)
A few things I find are improved in the autohint off version: 1) the Ma issue, 2) the 125 in the old autohint on has a "too high" 5

I suggest we move to the autohint off version (It's a one line change to SDL_TTF which hardcodes the load flags sent to freetype) .  Again, the Ma issue is only seen in certain non-bold fonts, which we only use in a few places in the app (NP, textareas). Unfortunately, setup uses a lot of those fonts, so the MP experience will be slightly less pretty than it could be, since it is likely too late to put this into MP...