"Primoz PETERLIN" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Hello, > > 2008/4/2, Joe Wells <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >> • The vertical spacing is screwed up (at least in xterm). This causes >> two problems: >> ‣ Each line takes up too much vertical space, so fewer lines can be >> displayed, which is a big problem on short screens. >> ‣ Characters that are supposed to combine vertically like "⎪" >> (U+23AA, CURLY BRACKET EXTENSION) have gaps between them. > [...] >> For the >> same reason, I have previously refused to upgrade to FreeFont.ttf >> versions of 2003-10-08 and 2006-01-26. Due to this problem, right >> now upgrading would actually be a downgrade. > > As you have correctly observed, this change to the worse has happened > well before Steve's management. At some point in the history, > FontForge decided - probably motivated by a stricter conformance to > the TrueType specifications - that when converting to TrueType, it > will write into the font the actual height of the font instead of the > declared one (i.e., from -200 to 800 units in case of FreeMono). Since > we have several glyphs reaching beyond the declared limits, this > actually prevents the glyphs from overlapping. On the other hand, > since the characters used in vertical combining reach exactly to the > limits and not beyond, this also means that they have gaps between > them.
There are two issues here: ① Whatever the height of the font is, the glyphs for line-drawing characters should correctly combine vertically. (It would be nice if FontForge would automatically check this for line-drawing characters.) ② It would be _really_ useful if the font was not as high vertically so that more lines can be displayed when the font is used in terminal windows. I would be happy if the font lied about its height to achieve this, because I am unlikely to ever see the glyphs that use the full height. If I occasionally do see these glyphs, I would rather see them overlapping a bit than have every line on the screen take 2 extra pixels vertically. Is there a way to achieve what I want? For example, can I somehow lie to Xft about the height of the font when I tell xterm to use this font? Or do I need to embed the lie inside the .ttf file? >> • Something awful is happening with combining accents. You can see in >> the screenshot in the test line "STARGΛ̊TE SG-1, a = v̇ = r̈, a⃑ ⊥ b⃑" >> that the combining accents (when they are drawn at all) are all >> positioned one character cell to the left of where they should be. >> This was working in the font as of 5 years ago, so presumably this >> is a bug introduced since then. > > I believe this also has to do something with the change of > specifications in the meantime. The combining characters have negative > horizontal coordinates, i.e., they are not drawn inside the character > cell, but in the place where the previous character would be, when the > text is typeset. This seemed like a good idea back in 2003, as it > resulted in the intended result, but apparently it no longer conforms > to the specifications. It sounds like you are saying FontForge now generates different contents in the .ttf file for the same original source. I suppose then that this is just on ordinary bug to be fixed. Thanks for replying to my message! -- Joe -- Heriot-Watt University is a Scottish charity registered under charity number SC000278