I just saw the recent EasyTimeline upgrade, patched for unicode compliance 4 days ago.

Unfortunately it breaks things seriously. Could this patch be reverted until I submit a better solution hopefully soon?

With the new patch all texts with embedded links will be garbled. This is why: EasyTimeline supports embedded links, Ploticus does not, so EasyTimeline divides and draw texts in segments, straight text in black, then linked text in blue, more text in black, carefully positioning each segment, depending on alignment, etc.

Currently Easytimeline script still assumes the standard monospaced font. So text with embedded links will be positioned wrongly with the new variable sized font. Now Wp authors will attempt to 'correct' the scripts to accomodate current offset errors, only to find charts are garbled again when the proper solution arrives.

My version asks Ploticus for font metrics and then handles text positioning of each segment well, with any font. It also allows to mix several fonts, adapts line spacing to font metrics, etc.

In fact the update for EasyTimeline is ready for months and was waiting for Ploticus patch I submitted patch for Ploticus that allows querying of Freetype font metrics. I just checked: this patch has been included in newest Ploticus release, thanks to Steve Grubb, so I can resume testing soon.

I know I'm late with my solution, which I announced in Frankfurt. My health was not 100% in previous months, in fact I'm still limited in the amount of work I can do here. I'm recovering but my day job comes first of course. So please bear with me for a while and leave EasyTimeline font support it was in the meantime.

Thanks, Erik Zachte