[Pkg-fonts-devel] Bug#974150: Bug#974150: Noto Mono looks completely different after upgrade

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Hi Steinar,

Quoting Steinar H. Gunderson (2020-11-10 18:42:02)
> Package: fonts-noto-mono
> Version: 20201027-3
> Severity: grave

Why the severity?

Visual changes does not seem reason release-critical to me.

"completely broken" need more than a vague suspicion, IMHO.


> For unknown reasons, Noto Mono looks completely different after I 
> upgraded my unstable machines recently, to the point that it's not the 
> same font anymore (for one, it has serifs). This affects multiple 
> machines, both rxvt-unicode and gnome-terminal, both X11 and Wayland, 
> and goes away if I downgrade. Compare the stable and unstable fonts 
> below (the version of fonts-noto-mono installed when urxvt started is 
> the sole difference between the two windows):
> 
>   https://home.samfundet.no/~sesse/noto-mono.png
> 
> The upper (stable) also matches what the font looks like if I look at 
> https://www.google.com/get/noto/#mono-mono. You can see some fragments 
> of it in the screenshot; look at e.g. the lowercase g.

Google dropped Noto Mono a few years ago.  We kept it alive, until 
recently when Google re-introduced Noto Mono.

The main goal of Noto fonts is large coverage, and second to that is 
coherent style across scripts.  I am not surprised that the 
re-introduced Noto Mono has changed visual style.  I would consider it a 
feature, not a bug.

Google does not maintain a changelog nor do they make proper releases, 
so we are left to guessing about their intents with these fonts.


> gnome-terminal doesn't even list Noto Mono in its list of available 
> fonts, so I'm wondering if it does some sort of fallback and that the 
> font just is completely broken somehow.

If Noto Mono fails to work at all, then that is indeed a severe bug - 
but I would consider that a _different_ bug than "looks completely 
different" as you've framed the subject of this bugreport.

I don't mind treating this bugreport _only_ being about this more severe 
issue, if you prefer - but if you weant to discuss both the visual style 
and the disappearance from some apps, then please file either as a 
separate bugreport.

I am not familiar with gnome-terminal, I only use urxvt myself.

urxvt can be told to use one specific font, but that only really works 
for X11 bitmap fonts - for tryetype fonts it can only beg fontconfig to 
prefer one, like this:

  rxvt-unicode -fn 'xft:Noto Mono'

This shows which actual fonts are most likely used:

  fc-match -s 'Noto Mono' | head -n 5


Thanks for reporting this,

 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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