English fonts appear poorly on Hebrew Ubuntu upgrade

[Ilan Tal]

This morning I did an upgrade to 15.04 on a Hebrew computer. Everything worked well except that the font is messed up. Specifically it fails to get the width of the letter correct so "l" and "i" have large spaces after them, and "m" overlaps the next letter.
I am referring to the dialog which stays on the screen during the upgrade. On the "white" portions of the dialog, the font is OK. The problem occurs when you open the console, "details" button. The main dialog box gives Hebrew translations to most items and the Hebrew is OK. There is one line of English telling what it is currently doing, which is also OK. Just the console which gives a history of what has been done, that has a screwed up font.
My guess is that it is taking the width of the Hebrew letters, instead of the English characters, which turns it into a mess.

This is clearly not a major problem, but it is a pity not to correct it.

Thanks,
Ilan

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Do you happen to have a screenshot of this?

[Ilan Tal (ilan-tal)]

I've been using Ubuntu for 10 years and have never before seen such a thing. However I've always done the updates in English.
In this case I was helping a friend whose English is less than great, so I configured his computer with Hebrew as the primary language. To answer your question, unfortunately, no, I don't have a screen shot. First of all, I didn't think of the idea on the spot. Second, I'm not at all sure that I could have used the Ubuntu screen shot program at that stage.
What I can say is that he has a dual boot with win7 and Ubuntu. On my systems, Ubuntu has always been the boss, with windows running only in a virtual box, if and when I need it.

In any case the letter spacing was fixed for any given letter. It was as if was using the spacing for the Hebrew letter when printing an English letter in its space. When it printed a given word, it was always messed up in exactly the same way. An English "i" which requires minimal space was given a lot of space. An English "m" which is wide overlapped another letter, i.e. the spacing for a Hebrew font used with English characters.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.