Many monospace fonts not properly spaced when mixing weights in gedit/gtksourceview

[Dag Odenhall]

Binary package hint: ttf-droid

I was coding in gedit with Droid Sans Mono 10 when I couldn't line up some Python code properly.

[Dag Odenhall (dag.odenhall)]

Seems to be related to mixing bold and normal; Droid Sans Mono Bold lines up properly.

[Lucas Vieites (lucasvieites)]

According to the font's creators (see: http://www.droidfonts.com/droidfonts/about/) this bug could be unrelated to the .ttf file. At about half-way into the article (under the Droid Sans Mono image) it says:
"We did one weight of the mono – the 3 other styles (italic, bold and bold italic) are currently made algorithmically by the font renderer."
Could this mean that the incorrect rendering is due to Xft2, freetype or a combination of these?

[Dag Odenhall (dag.odenhall)]

I have this issue with many other fonts as well, such as Monofur and Inconsolata. Should try the buggy fonts in something other than gedit/gtksourceview probably...

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Ruslan F. Atnabayeff (rfatnabayeff)]

Looks like the bug appears when the bold version of the font is not directly available and is artificially created by the rendering background. See the discussion with examples: http://askubuntu.com/questions/100672/how-to-prevent-automatic-bold-version-of-a-font-to-be-wider-than-regular-havin

[Ruslan F. Atnabayeff (rfatnabayeff)]

Removing a symbolic link to 90-synthetic.conf from /etc/fonts/conf.d/ makes the fonts properly spaced, but disables the artificial emboldening of fonts that do not have the dedicated bold versions.

[james_mcl (james-d-mclaughlin-googlemail)]

I know this hasn't been posted in since February, but I wanted to note that the removal of 90-synthetic.conf's symlink from /etc/fonts/conf.d/ has an irritating side effect when using gedit (or pluma) - unsaved documents no longer have their names italicised in the side panel (or "side pane").

This problem doesn't occur when using the other workaround from http://askubuntu.com/questions/100672/how-to-prevent-automatic-bold-version-of-a-font-to-be-wider-than-regular-havin - that is, the one in which you create ~/.fonts.conf and add the XML code from that site to it.

[Ruslan F. Atnabayeff (rfatnabayeff)]

90-synthetic.conf enables synthesis of bold and italic version of the fonts that do not originally have those versions. Removing the symlink disables the synthesis, so fonts without built-in bold and/or italic would render as regular. The issue is indeed somewhere within the font renderer - within freetype, probably.