Bug#1028643: fontconfig: 2.14.1-3 greatly changes font rendering

[Christoph Anton Mitterer]

Control: severity -1 normal

Hey Sébastien.

On Sat, 2023-01-14 at 15:19 +0100, Sébastien Villemot wrote:
> As far as I can tell, it’s not that the font rendering has changed,
> but
> that the default monospace font has changed (it was previously DejaVu
> Mono Book on my system, now it’s Noto Sans Mono; see the output of
> “fc-
> match monospace”).

Strange, for me - with the old version of fontconfig - it shows:
$ fc-match 
Vera.ttf: "Bitstream Vera Sans" "Roman"

(i.e. not DejaVu).


> I don’t know if this change is intended. Note that it in particular
> it
> impacts the default GNOME configuration.

Ah... I think I just realised that the "Monospace" font, which Cinnamon
shows in it's config as the default font for a monospaced font doesn't
seem to be an actual font, but just some alias or whatever default fc
sets?


Not sure how to best deal with this issue - do you think a NEWS.Debian
entry would be appropriate?
I mean changing that can be quite "annoying" to people, if they're very
used to their font and maybe do not even directly notice what's
different, just that something looks strange ;-)

At least personally, I find the increased line space quite ugly for
terminals, etc..


Cheers,
Chris.