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Issue created by P. H.@vain

Pango 1.44 and the removal of support for bitmap fonts

Pango 1.44 just landed in Arch Linux. Applications that use Pango and that are configured to use bitmap fonts now only show rectangles instead of characters. This affects popular terminal emulator setups, because many people use fonts like Terminus in applications like GNOME Terminal. #384 (closed) might be related, too.

There is a bug report in Arch Linux for this, but it only cites this blog post: It claims that the removal of support for bitmap fonts is intentional.

I have a few questions:

  • Is it indeed true that Pango no longer supports "traditional" bitmap fonts (PCF, BDF)? The NEWS file does not explicitly state this.
  • What is the recommended course of action for application developers? Should we use a library other than Pango? The blog post says Pango is "in maintenance mode", so maybe we should avoid using Pango altogether?
  • Or are good old bitmap fonts (PCF, BDF) considered dead and it's fine to keep using Pango, but we should require our users to use another font format (the blog post suggests "bitmap-only OpenType")?

Thank you!