Ligatures appear in monospaced text

[Rob Speer]

Binary package hint: gedit

If I am editing code with gedit, and I type the sequences of characters "fi" or "fl", then they will be replaced by a ligature and visually crammed into the width of a single character.

The two characters can still be selected and edited separately, so the bug is only visual and is not actually being introduced into the code. However, this is still bad for many reasons:

- Ligatures are not designed for monospaced text, so they don't look right
- The sudden replacement of two characters with a ligature is visually jarring
- Because the text now takes up a different amount of horizontal space, it can cause text that was meant to align with the text above and below to become misaligned
- Ligatures in plain text sometimes appear as the result of copying text from a PDF into LaTeX, in which case they are a bug that needs to be fixed before the document will be typeset properly. gedit makes it look like my LaTeX source has this bug when it doesn't.

How to reproduce: Type the word "final" in gedit.
Expected behavior: The result should appear 5 characters wide, made of the glyphs "f", "i", "n", "a", and "l".
Actual behavior: The result appears 4 characters wide, made of the glyphs "fi", "n", "a", and "l".

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: gedit 2.30.3-1ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-22.35-generic 2.6.35.4
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-22-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Oct 29 17:15:54 2010
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" - Beta amd64 (20100318)
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gedit

[Rob Speer (rspeer)]

I've found a workaround, which is to switch to a font that does not contain ligatures.

The font "Mensch", which I was using, has single characters for ligatures in it, and gedit was using them. "Monospace" does not, so its text displays correctly.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for the report, it has been some time without any response or feedback in this bug report and we are wondering if this is still an issue for you with the latest release of Ubuntu the Natty Narwhal, May you please test with that version and comment back if you're still having or not the issue? Please have a look at http://www.ubuntu.com/download to know how to install that version. Thanks in advance and sorry for the late response.

[Rob Speer (rspeer)]

Yes. In fact, it still happens on a machine where I installed Narwhal from scratch.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for gedit (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]