Created attachment 140109 [details] KDE font selection dialogue showing excess spacing around font preview for Terminus Bold. SUMMARY When a bitmap font is selected, and display scaling is also enabled (KDE -> System Settings -> Display Configuration -> Global scale != 100%), then the fonts are rendered at their unscaled size (this is expected for bitmap fonts), but instead each character is rendered with large amounts of surrounding space. T h e e f f e c t i s a b i t l i k e t h i s , a n d i s n o t u s a b l e . STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Install Debian 11 2. Install the fonts-terminus-otb 3. System Settings -> Display and Monitor -> Display Configuration -> Global Scale = 175% 4. Konsole -> Settings -> Edit Current Profile -> Appearance -> Font -> Choose -> Terminus Bold OBSERVED RESULT S p a c e d o u t t e x t . EXPECTED RESULT Not spaced out text. Gnome terminal behaves as I would expect in this case - instead it choses a different point size (e.g. if user has chosen 10 point, it will select nearest available font to ("chosen font * global scale factor") = 18 point. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Linux/KDE Plasma: Debian 11 (available in About System) KDE Plasma Version: 5.20.5 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.78.0 Qt Version: 5.15.2 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Debian bug 989831 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=989831 See also KDE bug #439936 I've found I can workaround this issue by disabling scaling in konsole by launching it with this wrapper: #!/bin/sh export SAVE_QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS="$QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS" export SAVE_QT_SCALE_FACTOR="$QT_SCALE_FACTOR" unset QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS export QT_SCALE_FACTOR=1 exec /usr/bin/konsole ...and then restoring the SAVE variables in the shell rc so that they are not inherited by commands which are launched from within konsole.
This is controlled by your fontconfig files and the Qt font rendering code; not any KDE code. You'll have to look elsewhere for a fix, I'm afraid. Not sure whether the problem is in Qt or your fontconfig files though, sorry.