Monospace fonts have too much space between glyphs

[Peter Hurley]

Monospace fonts in Ubuntu have traditionally had tight spacing between glyphs due to using fractional pixel sizes (through Pango).

Commit b0962ac3 in freetype upstream has introduced extra spacing between monospace glyphs by forcing integer scaling of text metrics.

[Peter Hurley (phurley)]

Attached is a quilt patch to revert the offending commit.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

The attachment "dense-monospace.patch" of this bug report has been identified as being a patch. The ubuntu-reviewers team has been subscribed to the bug report so that they can review the patch. In the event that this is in fact not a patch you can resolve this situation by removing the tag 'patch' from the bug report and editing the attachment so that it is not flagged as a patch. Additionally, if you are member of the ubuntu-reviewers team please also unsubscribe the team from this bug report.

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[Peter Hurley (phurley)]

After reading the upsteam comments here http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/freetype-devel/2012-04/msg00001.html
I agree that strictly speaking reverting the commit to get a dense monospace font appearance is not the right way.

In the case of this bug (bug# 966654), the use of integer scaling (as opposed to fractional scaling) is controlled by a single Flags bit in the header. When I get a moment, I'll put up a utility here to patch the font header.