Hi Egmont.
For bug 1, yes, fontconfig can be used for this. We even have a special
configuration file at /etc/fonts/conf.d/56-language-selector-ar.conf to
use a different font when the system language is Arabic (Noto Sans
Arabic). I believe it can be tweaked to use a custom Monospace font when
system language is Arabic like this:
<alias>
<family>monospace</family>
<prefer>
<family>DejaVu Sans Mono</family>
</prefer>
</alias>
Adding this to the file made the Monospace font change to DejaVu Sans Mono in
some places (e.g Gedit), but the GNOME Terminal was still using Ubuntu Mono for
some reason. I don't know why at the moment.
Perhaps I need to open a thread on Ubuntu Discourse. There are some i18n
guys there last time I remember. I will do that and see how we can
change the default font in the terminal for Arabic.
About lam-alif ligature, if you meant using the letter "alif" + letter
"lam" then they can be displayed in a good shape in the terminal. But if
you meant this one combined letter which has both alif and lam already
together then it is indeed broken in the terminal. However, not so many
Arabic people use this letter, and as a workaround, it can be written as
a normal lam + normal alif in order to be displayed like the first line
in my new attached screenshot. I think it's not a big deal for now.
For bug 2. Wow! Indeed as you said, it works well now and the text is
displayed correctly just like in Gedit. I attached a screenshot.
Is there a way where we can use this "printf '\e[?2501h'" workaround in
the GNOME Terminal in Ubuntu, at least only when the Arabic language is
set for the system by default? If the user is an Arabic-based user, then
it makes sense to offer this advantage for him/her in the terminal I
believe.
For example, we can append this by default to ~/.bashrc:
systemlanguage=${LANG:0:2}
if [ $systemlanguage == "ar" ]; then printf '\e[?2501h'; fi
If the system language is "ar", it will enable the auto-detection of
paragraph direction in the VTE session. What do you think? I can suggest
this in the Ubuntu Discourse too for the i18n guys.
Thank you Egmont for your help!
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You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop
Packages, which is subscribed to gnome-terminal in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2002290
Title:
Poor Arabic rendering in VTE
Status in gnome-terminal package in Ubuntu:
New
Status in vte package in Ubuntu:
New
Bug description:
VTE has a number of issues when it comes to rendering Arabic letters
in the terminal, which could affect a number of languages (Arabic,
Urdu, Persian... etc).
Bug 1: Any Arabic word in any VTE-based terminal is choppily displayed
with spaces between its letters, making readability hard and sometimes
not possible. Sometimes the letters are crushed together very closely
making reading impossible too.
Bug 2: If a non-Arabic text and an Arabic text are displayed together
in the same line, then the entire line will be missed up and you won't
be able to understand what is being said.
Both of these bugs can be seen from the image I attached.
I reported both of these bugs together because it's unlikely they can
be fixed separately, probably they are related to each other.
Problem can be seen in any VTE-based terminal. Here I am using GNOME
Terminal 3.44.0 on Ubuntu 22.04, but it can be seen in any Ubuntu
version and in any terminal version as well (it has been there since
forever).
I reported the bug here instead of upstream because that's what they
said at the page: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Terminal/ReportingBugs,
but this bug is not related to Ubuntu only; it happens on all Linux
distributions.
Happy to provide any information you need, or any do tests or
experiments.
To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bug/2002290/+subscriptions
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