Bold capitals render smaller than Regular capitals at certain point sizes

[pauldhunt]

The following information was received by me from Pablo García:

The rendering bug happens only for capital letters (caps / upper case). The px sizes affected are 24px, 23px, 22px, 21px, 10px and 9px. The exact problem is that bold face is 1px (or more) shorter than the normal face.

As you can see I have only tested up to size 25px.

The TTF / WOFF formats were forced both with the rendering bug (the screenshot would be exactly the same).

Environment:
Operating system: Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 64bits (x86_64, 2.6.32-46-generic)
Browsers:
Google Chrome Version 26.0.1410.33 beta (GPU disabled),
Chromium Version 27.0.1436.0 (187236) (GPU enabled)
Firefox 20
At Opera 12.14 the rendering issue is similar but happens instead at sizes: 16px, 13px.

We are using this CSS Link:
http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Source+Sans+Pro:400,700

CSS obtained as default, WOFF format used:
@font-face {
font-family:
'Source Sans Pro';
font-style:
normal;
font-weight:
400;
src:
local('Source Sans Pro'),
local('SourceSansPro-Regular'),
url(http://themes.googleusercontent.com/static/fonts/sourcesanspro/v5/ODelI1aHBYDBqgeIAH2zlBM0YzuT7MdOe03otPbuUS0.woff)
format('woff');
}
@font-face {
font-family:
'Source Sans Pro';
font-style:
normal;
font-weight:
700;
src:
local('Source Sans Pro Bold'),
local('SourceSansPro-Bold'),
url(http://themes.googleusercontent.com/static/fonts/sourcesanspro/v5/toadOcfmlt9b38dHJxOBGFkQc6VGVFSmCnC_l7QZG60.woff)
format('woff');
}

CSS obtained when forcing to TTF:
@font-face {
font-family:
'Source Sans Pro';
font-style:
normal;
font-weight:
400;
src:
local('Source Sans Pro'),
local('SourceSansPro-Regular'),
url(http://themes.googleusercontent.com/static/fonts/sourcesanspro/v5/ODelI1aHBYDBqgeIAH2zlNzbP97U9sKh0jjxbPbfOKg.ttf)
format('truetype');
}
@font-face {
font-family:
'Source Sans Pro';
font-style:
normal;
font-weight:
700;
src:
local('Source Sans Pro Bold'),
local('SourceSansPro-Bold'),
url(http://themes.googleusercontent.com/static/fonts/sourcesanspro/v5/toadOcfmlt9b38dHJxOBGLsbIrGiHa6JIepkyt5c0A0.ttf)
format('truetype');
}

[miguelsousa]

This is fixed in version 1.050. The image below shows the before (left) and the after (right). The sizes affected by the problem were 39, 36, 33, 25, 22, 19, 16 and 13. The rendering was performed on Windows 7.

[mattez]

This issue is back. It is at least issue of WOFF2.

I made basic test of Font Size vs Font Weight on CodePen.
Screen shot of this test is attached.

Font source: Google Fonts.
Browsers:
Google Chrome last version - use WOFF2
Old Safari 8.0.8 - use [TTF]

[mattez]

Also discussed here: fonttools/fontbakery#120

[frankrolf]

Google Fonts usually serves outdated font versions, can you reproduce the waterfall with the latest release?

[mattez]

I made some test across browser and it looks like it is more problem of browser rendering. I looks different across browsers Chrome vs Ubuntu.