http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?50470 is interesting and has a long history. It reverts a change made in 2011. This 2011 change has been historically patched out in debian distributions (and a number of others) for years, but recently they didn't patch it out. I'm just saying we need to be careful rolling past it because there is a good chance it will affect a bunch of layout tests.
Initial tests of the patch in Fedora have led to line spacing issues:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1437999#c9
Not sure if its Gnome-specific code that has problems, but there may definitely be issues to watch out for.
This roll is for Chromium itself, which uses an own FreeType for layout tests and otherwise uses system FreeType. Which may change though, and we might decide to bundle FreeType on Linux as well.
Re #16, I've only seen the capital A having a minor pixel difference, everything else was okay. So the Chromium FreeType roll is complete. It would be great if PDFium could sync to the same version.
Comment 1 by bungeman@google.com
, Mar 30 2017