[arch-general] pango 1:1.44-1 Renders Bitmap Fonts as Boxes.

[ProgAndy]

Am 28.07.19 um 20:35 schrieb David Rosenstrauch:
> On 7/28/19 7:49 AM, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> To save others' time, on upgrading to pango 1:1.44-1 today my terminal
>> emulator and other programs displayed empty boxes instead of bitmap-font
>> glyphs.  This is due to deliberate dropping of support by Pango.
>> https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/issues/386
>>
>> I don't think xterm(1) uses Pango given ldd(1)'s output, and it's
>> happily displaying nice crisp glyphs.
> 
> Yeah, I just discovered this the hard way.  Very annoying.  Doesn't seem
> like there's any fix/workaround either.
> 
> DR

Hello,

You can convert your BDF/PCF fonts to the "X11 bitmap only sfnt (otb)"
OpenType format[1], which harfbuzz does support[2]. As far as I know,
there are no tools that do this easily. (There are a few old projects on
github that might give a starting point like bdf2ttf). You can probably
script fontforge, though. I think it should also be possible to put all
different bitmap sizes and codepages in a single file, but that might
require more manual work.

Adobe Type1 (PostScript) fonts can be converted to OTF with the Adobe
Font Development Kit for OpenType (AFDKO)[3] (The AUR package is out of
date). This format should be readble by harfbuzz as well.


[1]: https://fontforge.github.io/bitmaponlysfnt.html#X11

[2]: https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2019/05/25/pango-future-directions/
    "Note that Harfbuzz does support loading
      bitmap-only OpenType fonts."

[3]: https://adobe-type-tools.github.io/afdko/AFDKO-Overview.html

--
Andy