Bug#1028897: fontconfig: wrong name for the Noto monospace font

Raphaël Halimi raphael.halimi at gmail.com
Sat Aug 19 16:01:34 BST 2023


Le 19/08/2023 à 16:04, Gunnar Hjalmarsson a écrit :
> As you may have seen, I submitted <https://bugs.debian.org/1050043> and 
> fixed it. Thanks for mentioning it!

Yes I saw that, you CC'd me ; and thank you for acting on this problem. 
Seeing that the time I spend on writing detailed e-mails to the BTS is 
not in vain, is very much appreciated :)

> On 2023-08-17 15:34, Raphaël Halimi wrote:
>> IMHO, if Debian wants to follow the upstream fontconfig default to
>> use the Noto fonts, the system should work without the DejaVu
>> packages installed, so it would make more sense to patch fontconfig
>> to use Noto Mono as a default and keep the "Noto look" across the
>> whole system, than to go back to DejaVu Sans Mono.
> 
> As regards "Noto look", and despite of the name "Noto Mono", personally 
> I think that DejaVu Sans Mono aligns better with Noto Sans/Serif than 
> Noto Mono does. Look at the letter 'g', for instance.
> 
> Also:
> 
> * If Debian would change the default monospace font, we would not follow 
> upstream. That's true whether we would pick Noto Mono or DejaVu Sans Mono.

As I said, having a "pure" Noto set or a mix of Noto and DejaVu set by 
default is a personal opinion (I did state "IMHO") and I admit I didn't 
compare those fonts thoroughly to see which one of Noto (Sans) Mono or 
DejaVu Sans Mono goes better with Noto Sans/Serif. I took a guess purely 
based on the fact that fonts distributed as parts of the same set are 
supposed to go along.

Since you're part of the team who maintains the package, I won't discuss 
your decision on that point (but I'd still prefer full-Noto or 
full-DejaVu over a mix of both, although I agree this may be a purely 
psychological bias).

> * There were reasons why I broke out DejaVu Sans Mono to its own 
> package. :) Given that change, it's possible to install 
> fonts-dejavu-mono without installing fonts-dejavu-core.

This remark made me read the Debian changelog and query #1043271. Thanks 
for clarifying that.

> For those reasons I disagree with the quoted statement.

As I said, we have a divergence of opinion, but as the maintainer of 
this package, you have the final word.

> Another question is if the Noto Sans Mono deficiency is important enough 
> to motivate a Debian level change in this respect. I don't know. 
> @Fabian, I sent this reply to you as well in the hope to broaden the 
> discussion a bit.

Here, I don't agree ; not on bringing more people in the discussion (the 
more thinking minds, the wiser the final decision will be), but on the 
very problem itself: did you see the screenshots I provided ? Won't you 
agree that the current default configuration is ugly, whether with Gnome 
Terminal or XTerm ?

(I know that for XTerm it's not really the "default configuration" since 
it uses bitmap fonts by default, but still, I consider the font resolved 
by the "Monospace" alias for TrueType fonts to be some kind of default).

> It's worth mentioning that the fonts-noto packages in Debian ship almost 
> 3 years old fonts. An update to latest upstream would be highly 
> desirable. Possibly Noto Sans Mono has improved.

I didn't know that. Thanks for mentioning it.

So, I just downloaded NotoSansMono-Regular.ttf from its new home [1] 
(the old repository in the Debian copyright file has been archived), 
opened it in font-viewer and... Sadly, the spacing is still 
"Proportional" and not "Monospace" :(

[1] 
https://github.com/notofonts/notofonts.github.io/blob/main/fonts/NotoSansMono/hinted/ttf/NotoSansMono-Regular.ttf

After all this time, I seriously doubt that that Google intends to fix 
that. Maybe we could open an issue in the new Github repository ? My 
hopes are not high, though. I'm afraid it will be ignored like the ones 
before.

Regards,

-- 
Raphaël Halimi



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