"Monospace Regular 8" became wider

[Egmont Koblinger]

I've been using gnome-terminal with "Monospace Regular 8" for years, which always had a 6x13 px font size (the same size as xterm, just nicer antialiasing).

With yesterday's update in Xenial, it became wider: 7x13 px each cell (and less pleasing to my eyes).

The neighbor sizes "Monospace Regular 7" is 5px wide, "Monospace Regular 9" is 7px wide just as "Monospace Regular 8", only taller. So it doesn't make sense for me for "Monospace Regular 8" to be 7px wide instead of 6px in between the two neighboring sizes as it used to be.

(No clue which package is the culprit, sorry.)

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
Package: fontconfig 2.11.1-0ubuntu7
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.4.0-6.21-generic 4.4.1
Uname: Linux 4.4.0-6-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20-0ubuntu3
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Fri Feb 19 09:11:41 2016
InstallationDate: Installed on 2012-05-30 (1359 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Release amd64 (20120425)
SourcePackage: fontconfig
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to xenial on 2016-02-13 (5 days ago)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Nikolay Shopik (shopik)]

I'm using Monospace Regular 11, and with 16.04 release it appears taller(stretched) and if I select 12 it looks normal (correct proportions) but become too wide and bigger.

[Nikolay Shopik (shopik)]

So I localized problem with font hinting. I've been always using font hinting slight, but with 16.04 release I had to disable font hinting to get back original look of my Dejavu Sans Mono book font as it was in 15.10.

Maybe there is issue in font hinting in previous releases, where it actually doesn't work while enabled.

[glennric (glennric)]

I don't think that the hinting has anything to do with the issue regarding the 8 point Monospace Regular font being wider than it should be. Changing the hinting settings does not affect the width at all.

[ubuntu user (aaadas)]

I believe this is the same problem:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fonts-dejavu/+bug/1589046

For me disable font hinting did not make font looks same as in 15.10.

[b_b (brunobergot)]

Same annoying bug here, for now i've changed the scale factor form 1.00 to 1.02 in order to retrieve something like it was before the upgrade...