There are enormous spaces between words with the default configs. This
is in wayland - not sure if that matters. Per the guidance, I disabled
justification and changed the font (DejaVu Serif regular, in my
case). That worked well.

It was already reported upstream but I am reporting this here because
the spaces are so severe that they would perhaps instantly lower
morale and put someone off Gemini. Users see this description in the
apt db:

  “high-quality visual cross-platform gemini browser”

So they would naturally have high expectations. Having this bug report
in Debian BTS might help someone who looks for info on this. The bug
was reported in 2021. Since it can be fixed with a config tweak, I
wonder if it might make sense to fix it in the Debian package.

Hi!

Thanks for using kristall and filling bugs!
I made it happen with DejaVu Sans, although Cantarell was the default one
here and I don't remember changing it.

Indeed ;-)

I will see if I can select a more sensible default font - although I
discovered people can be very pick about their fonts :-) Can you send
the exact style you had in your settings and a website I can test it to
see if we can improve the user experience?

Cheers,
Charles

Thanks for supporting Kristall!

Maybe you originally installed an earlier version than 0.4, which
might have had a different default, which then would have stuck
through upgrades. I just installed 0.4 to use Kristall for the first
time, and the default standard font was simply “Sans Serif”/normal/12.

There are many sans serif fonts on my system, which perhaps has a
different catalog of fonts than other Debian systems would have. And
because of that, I wonder if the default might be selected
arbitrarily. In my case, the font that was plainly named “Sans Serif”
was used as the “Standard Font” as well as H1, H2, H3, and
blockquote. This font is a disaster for all of those purposes. I guess
I should assume I have DejaVu* fonts because I installed djvu pkgs,
and TeX* fonts because I installed texlive. So in looking for a
generic and possibly common font, I tried “Latin Modern Roman” as the
standard font, which looks nice. I’m just guessing that’d be widely
available.

I wouldn’t try to cater for people’s personal tastes because the
software is designed to make it easy for users to tune the font. It’s
really just important to get rid of the intolerable default font. It’s
a disaster on every single site/page it renders. I’ll just name
gemini://techrights.org to give an arbitrary example.

Note as well I have in version 0.4 the known defect of blank icons to
the left of the URL field. They at least have a mouseover hover
msg. But in settings»style, all the icons on the right are also blank
and there is no mouseover for them. That was reported upstream in
2022, IIRC. Though I guess Debian is not a good place to fix that one.