CJK 'fixed width' font and 's p a c e d o u t' issue
Submitted by Jungshik Shin
Assigned to Chris Wilson
Link to original bug (#106618)
Description
Below is the excerpt from Anthony Fok's message to fonts list of XF86: (http://www.mail-archive.com/fonts@xfree86.org/msg01375.html)
<quote>
I was assigned with the task of dealing with "s p a c e d - o u t " CJK
"fixedPitch" font issue in konsole. There are quite a few modern CJK
TrueType fonts with the "fixedPitch" flag set to "true" to mean that:
- All CJK glyphs have the same "fullwidth"
- The ASCII glyphs and other special glyphs have the same "halfwidth"
I have submitted a small patch to the FreeType mailing list to deal with the "halfwidth" monospace font issue, and it turns out that Xft has the same issue. Anyhow, to demonstrate the issue, the following screenshot was taken after patching FreeType and before patching Xft:
http://anthony.homelinux.net/~foka/xft/halfwidth-rendered-as-fullwidth.png
The font therein is a popular "fixedPitch" Chinese TrueType font.
After applying the patch to Xft, it looks much nicer:
http://anthony.homelinux.net/~foka/xft/halfwidth-even-advance.png
</quote>
gnome-terminal has a similar problem to that of Konsole when CJK 'fixed width' font is used. When a CJK 'proportional font' (in which all CJK characters are of the equal width but non-CJK characters are of variable width), gnome-terminal makes sorta 'working' guess and works better than Konsole. Still, it's better to support CJK 'fixed width' fonts than using 'proportional fonts'. With the latter, wide characters like 'W', 'M', '@' bump upon neighboring characters or get cut in the middle.
</quote>
This problem had better be solved upstream in Xft and fontconfig (Anthony has a patch for Xft -see his email above - and more extensive patch is available at http://www.kde.gr.jp/~akito/patch/fcpackage/2_1/) but in the meantime, gnome-terminal can do some heuristics.
Resolution: RESOLVED FIXED