Re: [dev] [st] [sandy] wierd things happens to the font after sandy use

From: Christoph Lohmann <20h_AT_r-36.net>
Date: Sat, 29 Sep 2012 09:26:48 +0200

Greetings comrades.

On Sat, 29 Sep 2012 09:26:48 +0200 KarlOskar Rikås <kalle97r_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> Okey, I am using the Github repo, I'll check tomorrow try with other fonts,
> and other editors and programs.
>
> Note: same thing happens with DejaVu font too, also Nano seem to work fine
> but alsamixer does same mess with the text. Perhaps it is ncurses? Well,
> I'll try around with different things tomorrow and report back. Thanks for
> all quick replys.

The boxes you see are replacements because your font is missing some
symbols. Near to all default xft fonts are missing a wide range of sym‐
bols. Please try this with the Liberation Mono font, which has the line
drawing symbols. If these then appear after using sandy, then it is for‐
getting to switch back to the standard charset. This is a misfeature of
vt100, which is only implemented because some people really seem to have
used it in the dark ages of terminal emulation, when there was no UTF‐8.

Urxvt is solving this by doing some bruteforce on a list of fonts and
maybe it finds a symbol, crops and then displays it. This is something
xft should do for the developer. Such a bruteforce hasn’t been imple‐
mented yet for st, so the preliminary solution is to use a font with the
widest range of symbols.

If anyone here is more knowledgable in Xft programming and know how to
get Xft to load a range of fonts and then automatically select a fitting
glyph for a certain symbol, please let me know.


Sincerely,

Christoph Lohmann
Received on Sat Sep 29 2012 - 09:26:48 CEST