If I understand correctly the offending character is U+2236 ("RATIO") (UTF-8: e2 88 b6) but that's part of the Unicode Mathematical Operators block for which neither the new or old Ubuntu fonts have any support. So it doesn't make sense to blame this on the Ubuntu fonts.
What I think is happening is: * en_US and C fall back to some other font which has awkward spacing. * en_GB and other translations change it to a regular colon in the language-pack-gnome-en and language-pack-gnome-en-base packages. While this approach seems to be very intentional: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-desktop/-/merge_requests/66/diffs I don't think it makes sense for the default locale to be displaying a character that our fonts don't support and will trigger an unpredictable fallback. So I'm going to recommend we just patch this to a regular colon. Annoyingly this needs to be done in multiple locations per translation (.po file) depending on the date/time format a section of code is using. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Documentation Packages, which is subscribed to fonts-ubuntu in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2033377 Title: New whitespace between digits and colon in time at top of desktop screen Status in gnome-desktop package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Status in language-pack-gnome-en package in Ubuntu: New Status in language-pack-gnome-en-base package in Ubuntu: New Bug description: This has been confirmed in the daily canary image and the daily normal mantic image. This whitespace didn't exist in older images or in previous releases. An image will be attached in the comments --- ProblemType: Bug ApportVersion: 2.27.0-0ubuntu2 Architecture: amd64 CasperMD5CheckResult: pass CloudArchitecture: x86_64 CloudID: none CloudName: none CloudPlatform: none CloudSubPlatform: config CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME DisplayManager: gdm3 DistroRelease: Ubuntu 23.10 InstallationDate: Installed on 2023-08-30 (0 days ago) InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 23.10 "Mantic Minotaur" - Daily amd64 (20230829) Package: gnome-shell 44.3-1ubuntu1 PackageArchitecture: amd64 ProcEnviron: LANG=en_US.UTF-8 PATH=(custom, no user) SHELL=/bin/bash TERM=xterm-256color XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set> ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 6.3.0-7.7-generic 6.3.5 RelatedPackageVersions: mutter-common 44.3-1ubuntu1 Tags: mantic wayland-session Uname: Linux 6.3.0-7-generic x86_64 UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install) UserGroups: adm cdrom dip lpadmin plugdev sudo users _MarkForUpload: True To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-desktop/+bug/2033377/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~documentation-packages Post to : documentation-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~documentation-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp