Comment 9 for bug 2002290

Hello Egmont.

Thank you for the detailed reply and for fixing my understanding about these issues. I also highly appreciate your work and help!

I was using the default font in Ubuntu, but when I changed it to Monospace 9 (or even 12) as you suggested, the spaces issues disappeared and the text is now indeed very much more readable. I attached screenshots for Monospace 9 and 12.

I am not sure however, which Monospace font is that? I mean, to which family? In the terminal settings it just says "Monospace".

So perhaps the first thing we can drive from this to fix bug 1: Use a different terminal font by default in Ubuntu for GNOME Terminal instead of the one currently being used (which currently seems to me to be Ubuntu Mono 12)? Maybe this could be done at least when the system language is Arabic?

I will test additional possible fonts and see how they would look like.

For bug 2, I did a small test for "apt" output in the terminal and also in the web browser (attached images) and in Gedit. You can see that both the RTL webpage and Gedit can display the same output text very much better than the terminal, the order of the text is changed, and displays very nicely. Perhaps the only issue is from apt's translation side (they seem to have left 1 letter untranslated which is the M letter in "MB", which is giving the uncomfortable look), but aside from that, Gedit and the web browser can display the same text without issues, unlike in the GNOME Terminal which changes the order of the text.

So to sum up, if my understanding is correct, are you saying that VTE actually supports displaying RTL/BiDi correctly, and this is just an issue in "applications" like apt, tmux, vim... etc, and they need to fix this issue from their side? I mean, it is an issue in the apps themselves, and not terminal emulators (like GNOME Terminal), correct?

Thank you so much for your help, and for your work over the years. I am trying to make a small volunteering team to report all Arabic/RTL related bugs in Linux and open source software (we have sadly so many, like tens of them!), and we are gradually starting to report and investigate any bug.

I would happily test any scenario or experiment to fix any Arabic or RTL-related bug.

P.S: It sounds like Launchpad does not allow multiple image uploads (or I didn't find it), so I had to upload images one by one, sorry for that!