[nc] Ship Ubuntu Mono .psf as default console font in Ubuntu 11.10

[Paul Sladen]

Further to bug #724022 ("Wishlist: Enable use of Ubuntu Mono as .psf console-setup font"), Mark Shuttleworth requested that that Ubuntu Mono bitmaps be used as the default Ubuntu Mono font for console use in Ubuntu 11.10.

  "<sabdfl> fonts-ubuntu-font-family-console … needs to be a dep of 'ubuntu-standard', and the default mono font for 11.10 please"

Ubuntu 11.10 Hard Freeze is in 32 hours time. This would require:

  1. Upstream release of Ubuntu Font Family 0.80. A release candidate has been out for a couple of days with no reports of show stoppers (https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-font-family/+milestone/0.80)
  2. Distro upload of Ubutu Font Family 0.80 minus Medium for oneiric
  3. Accepting 'fonts-ubuntu-font-family-console' binary (built from the same source) into universe
  4. Promoting 'fonts-ubuntu-font-family-console' to main
  5. MIR for 'otf2bdf'
  6. MIR for 'bdf2psf'
  7. Adjusting of seeds to add 'fonts-ubuntu-font-family-console' to 'ubuntu-standard'
  8. Increasing CD/Image size by 18 kB in all cases. (By not building Italic/Bold Italic this would decrease to ~10 kB)

This would get 'consolefonts' installed, but would require users to manually install it. This would not require changes to screenshots or documentation adjusts as nothing in the default has changed. To subsequently set as default would require:

  9. '/var/lib/dpkg/info/console-setup.config' adjustments; the desired font capacity is limited; this sets the particular subset for Latin/Greek/Cyrillic/Arabic etc. We cannot replace all of these.
  10. We don't have sufficient glyph coverage to replace all of these.
  11. The snapshot of the hinted Ubuntu Mono fonts from Vincent Connare/Dalton Maag on 2011-09-22 are a vast improvement, but are still a work in progress.
  12. Regenerating Ubuntu server screenshots
  13. Adjusting documentation slightly, although likely minor

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Christopher Kyle Horton (christhehorton)]

I think this is still not done, and we just saw the release of Ubuntu 14.10.

[Christopher Kyle Horton (christhehorton)]

Is there a chance this bug could be revisited for 16.04 LTS?

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

On 17/12/15 04:51, Christopher Kyle Horton wrote:
> Is there a chance this bug could be revisited for 16.04 LTS?

I just tried it and thought it didn't look very good at low resolutions,
perhaps I tried the wrong version (I am on Xenial). I don't think we had
the font specifically optimised for the sort so 8x13 - 8x18 resolutions
used by console fonts, and of course there is no such thing as hinting.

Can anybody else weigh on on the merits?

Mark

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

If other people want to test:

  sudo apt-get install fonts-ubuntu-font-family-console
  dpkg -L fonts-ubuntu-font-family-console | grep -m1 .psf | xargs sudo setfont -C /dev/tty2

and then it's possible to flick between:

  Ctrl-Alt-F1 (tty1 showing Ubuntu Mono Regular rendered to 8x16)
  Ctrl-Alt-F2 (tty2 showing default: Terminus)
  Ctrl-Alt-F7 (GUI desktop)

The hinting information is used for generation of the bitmaps, but it's pretty sub-optimal. Rather than attempt to improve the hinting just to export to a bitmap …it would probably be faster/more efficient to take the Ubuntu Mono design principles and hunt and peck pixels in a bitmap editor as everyone did in the 1990s.

This would then not be derived either, and so with a BSD/MIT/PD licence it could be built to fall back on existing Terminus and so provide both useful coverage and the slight variations of the 'i' 'l', 'm' for the look and feel (because of the limited number of pixels most glyphs in terminal tend towards looking the same.