[Fontconfig] Cyrillic monospace problem

Stefan Baums fontconfig@fontconfig.org
Tue, 29 Apr 2003 21:58:20 -0700


Dear list,

I am using fontconfig 2.2.0, GNOME 2.2 and KDE 3.1.  When I set
the display font in a GNOME application on the one hand and in a
KDE application on the other hand to the exact same setting (e.g.,
Bitstream Vera Mono), the two applications exhibit different
strategies for supplying monospace Cyrillic characters that are
not contained in the selected display font.

The GNOME application (gedit for test purposes) will take Cyrillic
characters from a monospace font (in this case, some Courier-like
font that looks quite different from Bistream Vera Mono):

   http://staff.washington.edu/baums/gnome.png

which is fine, while the KDE application (tested kedit and
konsole) gets a proportional font and apparently tries to force
monospacing onto it, which results in glyphs that are spaced so
far apart that they end up taking much more space than the
Latin-script glyphs (and being so ugly that this has to be
considered a bug for aesthetic reasons alone):

   http://staff.washington.edu/baums/kedit.png

The result is especially gruesome in konsole, where we get some
weird overlap making the Cyrillic text illegible:

   http://staff.washington.edu/baums/konsole-1.png

and where scrolling down will lead to screen corruption:

   http://staff.washington.edu/baums/konsole-2.png

Is this something that should or can be fixed at the fontconfig
level, or does the bug lie with QT / KDE and should be brought to
those good people's attention?

Regards,
Stefan

-- 
Stefan Baums
Asian Languages and Literature
University of Washington