Monospace font bug?

Monospace font bug?

[Chong Yidong]

I need some help to track down what may or may not be a distribution
bug.

When compiled with XFT, Emacs tries a default font named "monospace-12".
In Fontconfig, this is usually aliased to a font like DejaVu Sans Mono.
But some systems (Debian unstable?) seem to have a font actually named
Monospace, and Emacs then uses this font.  This font is somehow buggy:
in bug#505, the X server can't retrieve the font information, and in
bug#1219 it displays in a very fugly manner.

I don't know whether is is a distribution bug, or a common situation
that we need to cope with.

Could those of you running on GNU/Linux please try to do

  ~ $ xlsfonts *monospace*

And see if anything is returned?  For me, this gives

  xlsfonts: pattern "*monospace*" unmatched

but the people who've encountered problems do see fonts like

  -unknown-monospace-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-m-0-iso8859-1

In bug#505, this font was registered in

  /var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType/fonts.dir

but there's no clue about where it came from.

Re: Monospace font bug?

[David De La Harpe Golden]

Chong Yidong wrote:

> And see if anything is returned?  For me, this gives
> 

FWIW, I'm running Debian/unstable, and neither xlsfonts (lists x core 
fonts, not that I encourage them on my system) nor fc-list (lists 
fontconfig/xft fonts) currently  show a font actually called "monospace" 
on my system.  That's not to say there isn't one lurking in the some 
package in the repos or something.

Re: Monospace font bug?

[David De La Harpe Golden]

David De La Harpe Golden wrote:

>  That's not to say there isn't one lurking in the some 
> package in the repos or something.
> 


Ah. George Williams has produced a font literally called "Monospace"
http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/sfds/index.html

It's not _currently_ included in the ttf-georgewilliams debian package, 
but has sometimes been included in at least ubuntu's on occasion.
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/feisty/i386/ttf-georgewilliams/1.0-1
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gw-fonts-ttf/1.0-1


(after installing monospace.ttf)
david@golden1:~/gw-fonts-ttf-1.0$ fc-list  | grep -i monospace
Monospace:style=Oblique
Monospace:style=Medium
Monospace:style=Bold

emacs can pick it up and use it if it's there, unsurprisingly.

         character: % (37, #o45, #x25)
preferred charset: ascii (ASCII (ISO646 IRV))
        code point: 0x25
            syntax: _ 	which means: symbol
          category: a:ASCII graphic characters 32-126 (ISO646 IRV:1983[4/0])
		   l:Latin r:Japanese roman
       buffer code: #x25
         file code: #x25 (encoded by coding system utf-8-unix)
           display: by this font (glyph code)
 
xft:-unknown-Monospace-normal-normal-normal-*-15-*-*-*-*-0-iso10646-1 (#x08)

Re: Monospace font bug?

[Chong Yidong]

David De La Harpe Golden <david@harpegolden.net> writes:

> Ah. George Williams has produced a font literally called "Monospace"
> http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/sfds/index.html
>
> It's not _currently_ included in the ttf-georgewilliams debian
> package, but has sometimes been included in at least ubuntu's on
> occasion.

That's an unfortunate choice of name.

Any suggestion about how to avoid matching to that font?

Re: Monospace font bug?

[David De La Harpe Golden]

Chong Yidong wrote:

> 
> That's an unfortunate choice of name.
> 

Yes, yes it is.

> Any suggestion about how to avoid matching to that font?
> 
> 

No. but is it desirable to?  If emacs says "monospace"
to the OS, and the OS returns something usable (see below), should emacs 
second guess it?   The distros with ttf-georgewilliams packages seem to 
be aware of the issue and are fixing it by removing or renaming the font 
in favour of the de-facto standard "monospace" virtual font name
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gw-fonts-ttf/+bug/95357/comments/6

Anwyay, while emacs on my display with george williams monospace doesn't 
look _wonderful_ - the font isn't hinted I guess, looks better at larger 
sizes - it is nowhere near as bad as  bug 1219's rendering. (I'll send a 
screenshot offlist).

If it were to be blacklisted very naively, I can even imagine someone 
who doesn't mind the non-dotted-zeros and with a hires display (so the 
hinting issues didn't matter) deciding they like it, and being perplexed 
when they tell emacs "monospace" and it doesn't work...

Of course, it's being rendered by xft not core x in my case.  But it 
certainly currently looks to me like bug 1219 could well be some aspect 
of core x's truetype font metric handling being buggy rather than the 
font or emacs for that matter being buggy.

So _maybe_ blacklisting it from the core x font backend might be 
worthwhile (I for one just don't use core x font rendering, it's 
terrible even when working right), but the font doesn't seem to me to
be a real problem when it's rendered by xft, and the problem
is being treated as a bug by the distros anyway?

Re: Monospace font bug?

[Chong Yidong]

David De La Harpe Golden <david@harpegolden.net> writes:

> No. but is it desirable to?  If emacs says "monospace"
> to the OS, and the OS returns something usable (see below), should
> emacs second guess it?   The distros with ttf-georgewilliams packages
> seem to be aware of the issue and are fixing it by removing or
> renaming the font in favour of the de-facto standard "monospace"
> virtual font name
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gw-fonts-ttf/+bug/95357/comments/6

That is a good argument.

I'll add an entry about this to etc/PROBLEMS; we can leave the rest of
Emacs unchanged.

Re: Monospace font bug?

[Stefan Monnier]

>> And see if anything is returned?  For me, this gives
> FWIW, I'm running Debian/unstable, and neither xlsfonts (lists x core fonts,
> not that I encourage them on my system) nor fc-list (lists fontconfig/xft
> fonts) currently  show a font actually called "monospace" on my system.
> That's not to say there isn't one lurking in the some package in the repos
> or something.

Same here, tho with Debian testing.


        Stefan