Bug#956633: libpango-1.0-0: 1.44.7-3 regression: wrong font rendering in geany/hexchat: invisible underscores

[Roland Hieber]

Control: forwarded -1 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/-/issues/471
Control: found -1 1.48.0-1
Control: affects -1 + geany
Control: thanks

In my case, I could also reproduce this in hexchat 2.14.3-4 with
Bitstream Vera Sans 8pt.

There are multiple upstream bug reports dealing with this issue:

* https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/-/issues/471 pango: "libpango
  1.44.7 does not display fonts correctly"
* https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/-/issues/478 pango: "Underscores
  not rendered in Hexchat when using Monospace 11/12 font"
* https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/-/issues/392 pango: "Underscores
  not rendered with some sizes of dejavu sans mono"
* https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/-/issues/264 pango: "Underscore
  character not visible on text with some fractional font sizes"
* https://github.com/hexchat/hexchat/issues/2449 hexchat: "Underscores
  not rendered in Monospace 11/12 font"

As mentioned in [1], it seems to be unclear whether this is a bug in
pango, or in the applications using it. However, Geany has added a
known workaround to its FAQ (increasing the line height) [3], and
hexchat has merged a pull request [2] recently (not released yet) that
apparently works around this issue.

Mattia, I quickly tried the hexchat patch [2] and it improves things for
me (line height is still a bit smaller than with pango 1.42, but
underscores are visible again). Could you throw it into the Debian patch
queue for hexchat?

[1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/-/issues/471#note_829205
[2]: https://github.com/hexchat/hexchat/pull/2500
[3]: https://geany.org/documentation/faq/#geany-does-not-display-underscores-anymore

If no other application is affected, we could close this issue.

 - Roland