[Pkg-fonts-devel] RFS: fonts-firacode/1.200-1 [ITP]

[Adam Borowski]

On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 at 09:57:23PM +0200, Rodolphe PELLOUX-PRAYER wrote:
> On 27/08/2016 16:52, Adam Borowski wrote:
> > Alas, in use, the font severely corrupts text:
> > https://angband.pl/tmp/firacode_corrupt.png
> 
> Weird. What's your editor?

jstar, but same happens with less or cat.  And editor you use has pretty
little meaning for a font, it's about text drawing library it uses.

> Maybe it need some special config (see
> https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode#editor-support)

Looks like the only terminal in Debian that can use this font is konsole
(and it has limited usefulness as it hard-depends on half of KDE).

Among others:
* mangled ligatures:
  • GTK2 vte: xfce4-terminal, lxterminal, ...
  • GTK3 vte: gnome-terminal, mate-terminal, terminator, ...
* no ligatures:
  • rxvt and forks
  • terminology
  • stterm
* terminal.app: upstream lists as "works", kaputt in Debian (#835894)
(I didn't try everything)

According to upstream, it's possible to configure GUI builds of emacs with a
large config that explicitely lists every ligature.


There's nothing wrong with packaging a font that has a limited use,
especially that with no ligature support it degrades to fully serviceable
regular Fira, but, as a strong majority (by popcon vote[1]) of terminals
fail badly, I'd say there should be at least a fat warning.


Meow!

[1]. As desktop environments pull in certain terminals, the "installed"
field is useless; in particular, xterm has vote of 1/200 of its installs.
-- 
An imaginary friend squared is a real enemy.