[7 mod] Ubuntu mono font is not suitable for ASCII pseudo graphics because of vertical gaps

[Eugene San]

1. At a terminal, enter:
pango-view --font="Ubuntu Mono 48" --markup --text='<span fallback="false">Ubuntu ─│┌┐└┘├┤┥┦┧&#13;Mono ── │└┘</span>'

What you see: Gaps between the vertical bars on each line.
What you should see: No gaps.

Ubuntu mono font is not suitable for ASCII pseudo graphics because of has vertical gaps

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: ttf-ubuntu-font-family 0.80-0ubuntu1~medium
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-12.19-generic-pae 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-12-generic-pae i686
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu2
Architecture: i386
Date: Wed Oct 5 08:27:32 2011
Dependencies:

EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" - Beta i386 (20110901)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: ubuntu-font-family-sources
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Please could you re-take the screenshot with the magic debug characters '' and '' visible somewhere inside the terminal. In Midnight-Commander it should be possible to type these at the command-line, but not actually execute them.

[Eugene San (eugenesan)]

Attached screenshot with magic, one question, what for?

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Thank you Eugene.

The left-hand magic symbol has the version number of the font that is being viewed. This is to catch cases where people think they are using one version of a font, and are actually seeing another. This has happened in the past with people having eg. old copies manually installed to '~/.fonts/'.

The right-hand magic symbol is to show whether hinting is in use. If hinting is disabled/not in use it shows the default '88' digital display. If the hinting engine is in use then it is designed to print the current size of the rendering in the number of pixels that are available. This is the pixels-per-EM (PPEM) size and so determines which hint set is in use and needs adjusting.

[Eugene San (eugenesan)]

Thank you for detailed explanation.
Hope provided information is sufficient and solution will be found soon.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

With the test case I've provided, I don't get any horizontal gaps, just vertical ones (and even those may be a side-effect of bug 1394914). In particular,

    pango-view --font="Ubuntu Mono 48" --markup --text='<span fallback="false">──</span>'

gives me a solid horizontal line.