> Actually, the font support in urxvt is excellent. No, it's not. That's why I felt compelled to write this message to the list.
> What exactly do you have problems with? Fonts don't display properly. I'm using a font that looks fine in KDE/Gnome, but shows up with massive letterspacing (gaps between letters) in urxvt. So a passage that looks like this normally s u d d e n l y l o o k s l i k e t h i s . It's practically unreadable. And when I change the letterspacing in my config file, urxvt magically replaces several letters with characters that are not in the font. This leaves the screen looking like a kidnapper's ransom note of letters from different fonts. I've been putting up with it until now, but it's a mild annoyance that I have to look at all the time. It works fine in KDE/Gnome, but everything else about urxvt is better so I was wondering why fixing urxvt's broken font support is such a verboten issue here. > Fonts that are larger than their bounding boxes should *not* work in > any application. That they do is actually a problem with the > applications where they do display. This is part of the reason urxvt > is great, and has the user base it does. It does the right thing > instead of displaying what is in practice garbage. Yes, of course. urxvt is logically perfect, therefore it has no need to cope with the messy imperfections of the real world. Fonts that don't display properly are "part of the reason urxvt is great"? That doesn't make any sense. I already addressed this way of thinking in my previous message, anyway. It's the same line that everyone repeats when the problem is brought up, instead of looking at the real problem -- which is that urxvt's font support doesn't work as well as that of KDE or Gnome. I anticipated your perspective because it's become a sort of strange dogma here. It doesn't matter if what's displaying is "in practice garbage". In practice, urxvt should be able to handle imperfect fonts like every other reasonably functional terminal emulator. > And Gnome is hardly a standard to hold anything up to, at that. ;) If Gnome is so bad, why is it so much better at font support than urxvt? Is font support really going to destroy the breathtaking elegance of urxvt and disgust its user base to the extent that everyone says, "my imperfect font actually works? Well, I shouldn't use this terminal emulator at all!" That sounds completely backward to me. Why not enable urxvt to work _better_ in practice, rather than clinging to its theoretical perfection at the expense (at to the added frustration) of its users? > On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 4:03 AM, kario tay <[email protected]> wrote: >> After using urxvt for about five months, >> there is only one function that it doesn't >> perform well: font support. >> >> Sort of ironic, given the purpose of urxvt. >> >> Is anyone else at the point of being ready >> to wrestle the font-support problem into >> a comprehensive solution? >> >> All I've heard so far are basically explanations >> for why the fonts are wrong, and why urxvt >> needs to stay logically perfect >> rather than display fonts correctly. >> >> "No, the fonts are displaying correctly. >> It is the font that is incorrect!" >> >> Well, some fonts still don't look right, and I've >> seen several message threads here about this issue. >> >> How about fixing urxvt so that it becomes >> compatible with fonts that are "larger than >> their bounding boxes", so that letter spacing >> is consistent and so that glyphs render as expected, >> "correct" or not? Considering that KDE and Gnome >> can do these tasks, they probably don't require >> "artificial intelligence" to solve. >> Aside from that (and a couple of >> minor glitches), urxvt is almost great. >> ____________________________________________________________ Publish your photos in seconds for FREE TRY IM TOOLPACK at http://www.imtoolpack.com/default.aspx?rc=if4 _______________________________________________ rxvt-unicode mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schmorp.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rxvt-unicode
