The newest version in the experimental repo, 1.44.6-1, breaks the displaying of XLFD bitmap fonts in GTK applications. If you set the UI font to a bitmap font (Fixed) in /etc/gtk2/gtkrc, all characters are replaced by empty glyphs. I do not have GTK3 installed (since I dislike the direction GTK is taking), but it should affect GTK3 as well. Downgrading the packages "libpangoft2-1.0-0", "libpangocairo-1.0-0" and "libpango-1.0-0" from 1.44.6-1 to 1.42.6-7 fixes the problem. See attached screenshots for the issue. PS: Before you say "nobody is using bitmap fonts", you should consider that not everybody has a high-definition screen or want to see blurry text. ----- Please limit your reply to 7-bit ASCII. I refuse to see your idiotic emoji in a TTY.
My understanding is that dropping bitmap font support was intentional. See: https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2019/05/25/pango-future-directions/ and https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2019/08/07/pango-1-44-wrap-up/
It is sad to see this. It is the same reason that I refuse to use GTK3. I hope that you can contact upstream to preserve bitmaps. Or at least compile a separate package with bitmap support. The problem is that most TrueType fonts are rendered poorly unless you have a high-DPI/"retina" display, which most people do not have. Also, remember that embedded devices usually have low-resolution screens (like 128*128 or 64*64). If you enable antialiasing you get blurry texts. If you disable antialiasing you get out-of-shape texts. Bitmap fonts have no such problems because they are pixel-perfect and does not require antialiasing if a fixed font size is specified (which in most cases is). Last but not least, bitmap fonts are easy to edit, unlike TrueType fonts. Also, not everyone uses a DE like GNOME. I (and many people) use WMs like i3 and TWM because they use fewer resources and has fewer distractions. If I use a minimal WM and I use the terminal all day long, obviously I want the UI font to be the same as the terminal font. ----- Please limit your reply to 7-bit ASCII. I refuse to see your idiotic emoji in a TTY.
Pango 1.44.7-3 has been uploaded to unstable so I expect this will break even more setups. example was using xfonts-terminus. For the discussion on the upstream issue tracker refer to https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/issues/386 One possible solution discussed there is to use OpenType versions of the bitmap font, these are still supported. Fedora has some info about converting bitmap fonts to OpenType: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BitmapFontConversion For Terminus I was able to convert it locally and make it work with Pango: https://superuser.com/a/1539389 So the issue could be fixed at the font level, wrt. Terminus I will try to have an otf variant uploaded to Debian. I hope this info is useful for other people missing bitmap fonts. Ciao, Antonio
I was wondering why "dunst", suddenly, stopped displaying characters, even though dunst itself didn't change. Looking at the upgrade log, I catch pango, and now I see this. I generally don't use bitmap fonts, but they have their uses. At low resolutions they can't be beaten. Terminus is excellent. I know debian has little to do with this decision, so I'm only here to join in stating that I'm too deeply sorry for this. I'm also not happy at all behind most of the UI and technical decisions behind GTK3. I say that as a big, big lover of GTK2. I'm _even_ using the GTK plaftorm style in QT.
The problem with the OTB format is that there are spacing issues. Also if you do so, the same font would appear twice. A possible solution is to keep the old version of Pango (libpango-legacy) in another package, and provide an alternative in dependencies (Depends: libpango-1.0-0 | libpango-legacy). -- Please limit your reply to 7-bit ASCII. I refuse to see your idiotic emoji in a TTY.
I've seen spacing problems with the TTF version, but the OpenType version converted locally from the original bitmap font seems OK, at least for what I do. Can you elaborate on what spacing issues you observed? Thanks, Antonio
Hi, Being hit by this issue since today in testing (i3 and dunst user too). I can't say discarding bitmap is the right/wrong move, but not being informed about it made me hope it won't hit stable the same way, pangolins are delicate subjects. Providing font conversions could be nice. Regards,
Here is the report regarding the spacing problem: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/-/issues/471 The original issue in "libpango" on the GNOME GitLab is locked so they refuse to listen to anything regarding that deprecation. Seriously, can you just keep that package at 1.42 (or add a "legacy" package)? It breaks too many use cases. I can hold that package from upgrading, but eventually, some packages may require the new version (just like "chromium" and GTK2). -- Please limit your reply to 7-bit ASCII. I refuse to see your idiotic emoji in a TTY.
I do not think that it can be fixed in a per-font basis. The problem with fonts is that most people download them from the internet or (in case of bitmap fonts) make them manually. I personally use a modified version of the default Fixed font using "gbdfed". Also, once you convert the font to OTB format, it is impossible to manually edit (with simple tools like "gbdfed"; tools like FontForge seems to always mess things up). -- Please limit your reply to 7-bit ASCII. I refuse to see your idiotic emoji in a TTY.
Adding a NEWS entry explaining that support for these formats is gone would help prevent a lot of frustration for users (myself included) who were surprised after upgrading and got to go track down the issue. Maybe something like: Pango 1.44 no longer supports BDF & PCF (X11) bitmap fonts and Type 1. Upstream has switched from using Freetype to Harfbuzz for loading fonts, which means it no longer supports various old font formats including X11 bitmap fonts and Type 1 fonts. These however can be wrapped in the supported OpenType format, for details see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/-/issues/386 and https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BitmapFontConversion - -- System Information: Debian Release: bullseye/sid APT prefers testing-debug APT policy: (500, 'testing-debug'), (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (130, 'unstable-debug'), (130, 'unstable'), (120, 'experimental-debug'), (120, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-5-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU threads) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) LSM: AppArmor: enabled Versions of packages libpango-1.0-0 depends on: ii fontconfig 2.13.1-4.2 ii libc6 2.31-3 ii libfribidi0 1.0.8-2 ii libglib2.0-0 2.64.4-1 ii libharfbuzz0b 2.6.7-1 ii libthai0 0.1.28-3 libpango-1.0-0 recommends no packages. libpango-1.0-0 suggests no packages. - -- no debconf information -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iHMEARECADMWIQTlAc7j4DAtSNRJJ0z7P4jCVepZ/gUCX1ZBJhUcYW50aG9ueUBk ZXJvYmVydC5uZXQACgkQ+z+IwlXqWf5/jgCfbkGaBEMR9d309ULzqp0a0y3W8aQA nRfTQXoAybbyHGAPFzULPnjA/dsx =/HOG -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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