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

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi David,

> > You can convert your BDF/PCF fonts to the "X11 bitmap only sfnt
> > (otb)" OpenType format[1], which harfbuzz does support[2].
>
> So these aren't "my" fonts.  I'm using one of the bitmapped fonts that
> ships with X in xorg-fonts-misc as my terminal font.

`My' bitmap fonts are also packaged.

    $ fc-list :outline=False file |
    > sed 's/: $//' |
    > xargs -rd\\n pacman -Qqo |
    > sort -Vu
    bdf-unifont
    xorg-fonts-100dpi
    xorg-fonts-misc
    $

> Does anyone know if there's any plans for these fonts to be usable
> with pango going forward?

There doesn't seem much point packaging a font in a format that isn't
supported by most software.  It would seem the upstreams, GNU and X.Org,
should ship those fonts in the current and OpenType-bitmap formats,
otherwise all packagers on every distro will come under pressure to
convert during packaging.

Speaking of conversion, ProgAndy mentioned an Adobe program.  There's
also https://github.com/fonttools/fonttools, packaged on Arch, that
looks like it might be able to do it given its support for the EBDT and
EBLC tables.

And FontForge should be able to do it
https://fontforge.github.io/generate.html lists ‘X11 bitmap only sfnt
(otb)’ amongst the bitmap types.

It's worth keeping an eye on
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/issues/386  If you look at the
‘History’ tab of https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/63297 you'll see I
asked for this link to be added to the issue but that was refused.
The mentioned blog post, deemed sufficent, leaves the reader stranded.

gimp users are also impacted by this; their collection of bitmap fonts
are now unusable.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.