Arch Linux

This task was once closed because 'st' is an AUR package. But Emacs (of course, offical package) also gets abnormal spacing.

It seems to be a problem of Xft.
https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=39082

As for Emacs, the problem seems to be avoided by building emacs with cairo enabled.

This is also a problem in kitty (https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/kitty/).

Issue also manifests itself in gitk.

I believe it is also present in dmenu

It seems the core problem is that XFT is unmaintained, and the recommended solution is to move affected packages to rely on Cairo instead: https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/voidrice/commit/f6659aac334265a73c48d27a7babdfce1f5f886e#commitcomment-37998014

Same behaviour on rxvt-unicode

I also have font rendering issues in Emacs/Alacritty terminal. So the Inconsolata github repo has more recent changes that may or may not improve the situation, but there isn't a properly tagged release including those changes.
Basically the last release v3.000 is including changes up to Dec 2019. I think we should start packaging this font just following master commits directly when we find the font is working well.

And just to confirm version 1:2.0.0.1-3 works well for me, but not 1:3.000-1. Hence I propose to try the last changes in master from https://github.com/googlefonts/Inconsolata and if so, start releasing picking specific commits from master (instead of using official tags which aren't kept up to date).

https://github.com/googlefonts/Inconsolata/issues/25

As mentioned above, this is an issue with xft so it's unlikely to be fixed in the fonts. Anyway, what about trying that git build yourself and reporting your findings?

Fair enough. I was thinking to build myself the font, but oh well, it's actually complex, extra tooling is needed, not really an automated process. But seems like they regenerated the font on the last changes[1], i tried and no improvement with Emacs, same wide spaces problems, which rules out xft based applications. I'm aware that recent Emacs now has stable support for cairo backend, so that seems the best approach in my specific case if Arch enables it.

[1] https://github.com/googlefonts/Inconsolata/blob/master/fonts/ttf/Inconsolata-Regular.ttf

I cannot reproduce the issue.
Is it still valid?
Can you provide a screenshot?

I can reproduce on rxvt-unicode (screenshot attached). Please let me know if there are other reproduction instructions, or inspection info I can provide.

Workaround has been to use version 1:2.0.0.1-3.

This is supposedly fixed in recent libxft [1]. Either way, I'm failing to see how this is an Arch packaging problem.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libxft/-/issues/15