Bug#939748: Newest version breaks rendering of bitmap fonts in GTK applications.

[Antonio Ospite]

On Sun, 08 Sep 2019 11:20:28 +0000
"Gong S." <pthfdr at protonmail.ch> wrote:

> The newest version in the experimental repo, 1.44.6-1, breaks the
> displaying of XLFD bitmap fonts in GTK applications.
>

Pango 1.44.7-3 has been uploaded to unstable so I expect this will break
even more setups.

> If you set the UI font to a bitmap font (Fixed) in /etc/gtk2/gtkrc,
> all characters are replaced by empty glyphs.
>

A simpler use case is people using bitmap fonts in gnome-terminal, I for
example was using xfonts-terminus.

For the discussion on the upstream issue tracker refer to
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/issues/386

One possible solution discussed there is to use OpenType versions of the
bitmap font, these are still supported.

Fedora has some info about converting bitmap fonts to OpenType:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BitmapFontConversion

For Terminus I was able to convert it locally and make it work with
Pango: https://superuser.com/a/1539389

So the issue could be fixed at the font level, wrt. Terminus I will try
to have an otf variant uploaded to Debian.

I hope this info is useful for other people missing bitmap fonts.

Ciao,
   Antonio

-- 
Antonio Ospite
https://ao2.it
https://twitter.com/ao2it

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