FS#60156 - [noto-fonts] Noto Sans Mono has weird ligatures

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by Tobias Stolzmann (teiesti) - Saturday, 22 September 2018, 07:42 GMT
Last edited by Antonio Rojas (arojas) - Sunday, 28 October 2018, 16:06 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category Packages: Extra
Status Closed
Assigned To Antonio Rojas (arojas)
Architecture All
Severity Medium
Priority Normal
Reported Version
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

I use Noto Sans Mono from the package noto-fonts 20180322-1 as my default monospace font. In some applications like Chromium or Atom, a letter combination such as fi or fl is rendered as a ligature. In Noto Sans Nono, a ligature representing two letters has currently the width of a single letter. That contradicts the idea of a monospaced font and causes problems with the alignment in source code, e.g. the words

find
bind

have the exact same number of letters and should therefore end in the same column but they don't because of the flawed fi-ligature.

The issue was previously described upstream in https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/issues/1021. The upstream repository (https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/tree/master/phaseIII_only/unhinted/ttf/NotoSansMono) contains a patched version which is untouched since 4 month. The official website (https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-mono) still ships a version that is buggy. I've asked upstream (https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/issues/1021#issuecomment-423722594) for the reason of that difference.

If the fonts in the package noto-fonts are directly gained from the repository, I'd like to ask for an update. (I decided not to use the normal flagging mechanism because that would cause confusion if the fonts are gained from the official website. This issue allows me to add some explanation.)

If the fonts are gained from the website, I'd ask to switch to the repository. IMHO, a monospaced font that isn't really monospaced is close to being useless.
This task depends upon

Closed by  Antonio Rojas (arojas)
Sunday, 28 October 2018, 16:06 GMT
Reason for closing:  Fixed
Additional comments about closing:  noto-fonts 20181024
Comment by Antonio Rojas (arojas) - Saturday, 22 September 2018, 08:11 GMT
We are getting the fonts from the git repo, but from the 'stable' dir. Those ones are WIP. Main problem is that there is no updated hinted version yet of Sans Mono. So the question is which is the lesser evil, losing hinting or getting some incorrect ligatures. Ideally upstream should release an update.
Comment by Tobias Stolzmann (teiesti) - Saturday, 22 September 2018, 13:48 GMT
This sounds like a dilemma, especially because this comment (https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/issues/1021#issuecomment-423738245) sounds like they won't release an update soon. I'd argue that hinting is just about beauty while those wrong ligatures cause problems beside that: If the alignment is wrong, this might affect codebases that I work on. In fact, it already did!

Therefore, I'd go for the unhinted version as long as upstream takes no action. We can regard that as a temporary workaround while were waiting for the good things from upstream... ;-)

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