Bug 86786

Summary:	Monospace is a bad choice as default fixedwidth font
Product:	[Applications] konsole	Reporter:	Hans de Goede <jwrdegoede>
Component:	general	Assignee:	Konsole Developer <konsole-devel>
Status:	RESOLVED NOT A BUG
Severity:	normal
Priority:	NOR
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	RedHat Enterprise Linux
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Hans de Goede 2004-08-08 12:47:47 UTC

Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.2.3)
Installed from:    RedHat RPMs

-export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
-fire up konsole
-less http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-demo.txt
-Notice how lots of chars are missing because they aren't there in the monospace font.
-Now change the font to MiscFixed
-Notice how much better this is!

Comment 1 Stephan Kulow 2004-08-08 13:47:29 UTC

"monospace" is an alias set by the distribution's fonts.conf and as far as I know konsole defaults to a bitmap font

Comment 2 Hans de Goede 2004-08-08 15:52:18 UTC

Maybe konsole is a bad example (again). I was (am) reporting this against kcontrol because I believe the problem to be bigger then this, anything using fixed width fonts displaying advanced utf-8 is going to be bitten by the problem that the monospace font misses lots of characters.

Actually I've also submitted a bug against konsole because indeed is it using its own font instead of the system-wide configured fixed width font, which I found out after this bug was filed.

Please notice that I'm mainly a gnome user, and even more a commandline user. I was testing UTF-8 support in xterm, hit a few problems and after that have expanded my testing to gnome and kde, hence all the bug reports.

I also don't know that much about fonts :) If I've understood you correctly that there is no such thing as a Monospace font, and that the Monospace font name is just an alias which should be setup by the distribution to point to the best available font, then this bug can be closed and I'll refill it in Fedora's bugzilla.

Comment 3 Stephan Kulow 2004-08-08 16:16:03 UTC

Right, e.g. this is from SL 9.1 
<!--
  Monospace faces
 -->
        <alias>
                <family>Bitstream Vera Sans Mono</family>
                <family>Courier</family>
                <family>Courier New</family>
                <family>Andale Mono</family>
                <family>Luxi Mono</family>
                <family>Nimbus Mono L</family>
                <family>NSimSun</family>
                <family>FreeMono</family>
                <default><family>monospace</family></default>
        </alias>
<!--

This "monospace" font is a truetype font, you don't want a bitmap font displayed on web pages when they request "monospace" for code display. So
konsole's default should be a different one than the one for web pages/kate.

Comment 4 Kurt Hindenburg 2005-03-29 06:54:54 UTC

The default font is now taken from KControl->Appearance->Fonts->Fixed Font

Comment 5 Charles A. Landemaine 2006-10-19 00:46:28 UTC

> The default font is now taken from KControl->Appearance->Fonts->Fixed Font

Not here :)
Here it is using an ugly Bitstream Vera Sans Mono although my fontconfig file defines Nimbus Mono as default monospace font. Again, monospace is not a font, it`s a familly font. Just map monospace to whatever you want. I recommend the URW Nimbus familly fonts for serif, sans-serif and monospace. They`re really nice. But for Konsole, obviously default font should read `monospace`, which will map to whatever the distro decided to map for monospace.