The Levi is alive!
You don't like our new enhanced rendering for the letter r on Windows?

Joking aside, that looks really odd. Is this happening consistently for you?

100%! For some reason I find myself on NYT's front page frequently, and the r's have been looking funny for at least awhile... Are you having trouble reproing?

Interesting. Yeah, can't reproduce. What are your DPI and font settings like?

Actually, never mind. Can repro at 110% zoom on a 2x high-dpi device.

200% Windoze scaling. I've never mucked around with the fontz. Buuuuuut, I just realized I was at 110% page zoom! Upon resetting to 100%, the issue fails to repro!

My device also has a touchscreen, and applying nearly any pinch-zoom also causes the issue to disappear upon re-raster.

I couldn't find a zoom level that repros on Canary or Stable (but I only have 1.5x and 1x monitors).

It looks like that vertex just goes off into la-la land though.

Just downloaded and gave this a shot in Canary -- same issue at 110% zoom.

This sounds like bytecode interpretter going crazy.  We had this bug with FreeType, specifically with the webfont on NYTimes. No idea how this can happen on Windows.  Dominik might know.

Thanks Behdad!

Levi!! You here?! Thanks for the report. Ben, would you have any ideas? I could try to do a Skia reduction/repro with scaling this web font at odd zoom factors.

We've had issues with this 'r' before, see  issue 420355 . On Windows Skia is either going to call into DirectWrite for the rendering or render from paths itself. It would be good to know which path this is.

Notorious NYT-r!

Thanks for looking into this! EditBugs is a friggin' superpower.

Reproducible at low dpi screen on Edge 25.10586.672.0, Firefox nightly and Chrome stable using 
http://roettsch.es/cheltenhamr/r.html with a "r" subsetted Cheltenham 700 italic font from https://typeface.nyt.com/fonts/nyt-cheltenham-700-italic.woff

At 56.6px to 57.3px, 58.6px to 59.3px and 80.6px to 82.3px there are various artifacts, screenshot on (from the top) Edge, Chrome 56 and FF nightly attached. The stem-cut, but also some sort of incision from under the r's upper arc, and a little thorn on the right upper outer curve.

Removing the hinting instructions on the r using fonttools the errors go away, supporting Behdad's hypothesis from comment 10. 

I'll forward this to DirectWrite and Edge contacts, and see what they say. Perhaps it's a font bug, or otherwise indeed something in DirectWrite's hinting interpreter.

This is on Windows 10 Enterprise "Version 1511" from "About your PC"

Related:  issue 435277