Wrong glyph variant for Bulgarian Cyrillic small letter b (б, U+0431)

[Pavel Mihaylov]

The current Ubuntu font family uses the Serbian/Macedonian glyph variant for the Cyrillic small letter b (б, U+0431) when text in Bulgarian is rendered. The affected fonts have a specific substitution table that replaces the default correct glyph with the wrong language specific one. This is related to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-font-family/+bug/708578. As suggested in one of the last comments there, Bulgarian should use the exact same glyphs as Russian in all styles, including italic. No other font family uses the Serbian/Macedonian glyphs for Bulgarian, including pre-computer printed material.

Example generated with:
pango-view -o /tmp/bulgarian-b.pdf --font 'Ubuntu 24' --width=250 --markup --text "Expected glyphs: <span lang='ru'><big>б <i>б</i></big></span> Actual glyphs: <span lang='bg'><big>б <i>б</i></big></span>"

[Pavel Mihaylov (bin)]

Temporary fix (modifies the font binaries):

cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ubuntu-font-family
sudo sed -i.bak -e 's/\x03BGR /\x03XXX /' *.ttf

The above command will replace the string BGR (ISO 3166-1 code for Bulgaria) with XXX (a user assigned code). The original files will be backed up as *.ttf.bak.

[Adolfo Jayme Barrientos (fitojb)]

This is now tracked at https://github.com/daltonmaag/ubuntu/issues/45

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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