Terminal displays incorrectly with proportional font when DejaVu is uninstalled

[mounty]

Since the DejaVu font is no longer installed by default, the terminal metric calculations with the default proportional font are haywire; it is necessary to use the settings to put it back to a fixed-pitch font.

[luroh]

I don't understand. What makes you say that DejaVu isn't installed by default? It's included in both the @release and the @nightly profiles. How do you manage not to get DejaVu installed by default?

[mounty]

It was based on comments by various people in a discussion in the haiku-development list. See my message "various problems with current developer head" dated Sat, 17 Jan 2015 15:17:01 +1000 and the various responses thereto.

The terminal display is haywire but it may be that my explanation thereof is incorrect.

[luroh]

Yes, I read that thread and it contains a few misconceptions.

The DejaVu typeface is installed by default and Terminal is using its Sans Mono font by default. VL-Gothic will be used as a fallback where the default font has no glyph coverage.

Now, if you remove the DejaVu typeface, Haiku currently defaults to using Bitstream Charter, with VL-Gothic providing fallback where Charter has no glyph coverage.

[mounty]

I didn't remove any fonts. I performed a developer build, booted the resulting installation, and opened the terminal. It came up about twice as wide as normal, with the displayed characters widely separated.

[luroh]

DejaVu is included in all officially released images. It is certainly possible to produce a custom build that doesn't contain DejaVu. Not sure what you mean by developer build, but if you use a @nightly or @release build profile you should be good.

[pulkomandy]

The fact that DejaVu can be removed is not a bug, and yes, it is still in the default profiles.

However, when DejaVu is removed, the terminal should default to VL-Gothic. It should not use Bitstream Charter, which is a proportional font. VL-Gothic is always installed because it is a dependency of the Haiku package.

[mounty]

I say again: I did not remove any fonts. The procedure I followed is:

1. git pull -v ==> hrev48700
2. jam arguments
3. reboot into newly-installed system (jam installs to a separate partition)
4. don't install; go straight to desktop
5. open terminal and enter ls -l
6. screenshot of result is attached

[mounty]

screenshot of terminal showing proportional fonts

[pulkomandy]

The key here is the "arguments". If you use the minimal build profile (as is the case with jam -q haiku.image, for example), the DejaVu font is not installed. But if you use the "alpha" or "nightly" profiles, it is.

You can use AddHaikuImagePackages dejavu ; to add the font to your image, and it will be used by default.

In any case, Terminal should not end up using Bitstream Charter, it should pick a monospace font as long as one is available.

[mounty]

Sorry, yes, I was using a minimal build profile. Now that I've switched to a nightly- profile, DejaVu is included and the terminal is displayed correctly. It seems that I don't have the ability to close this ticket; otherwise I would do so.

[diver]

(In #11792) Duplicate of #11764.

[jackburton]

Replying to pulkomandy:

The key here is the "arguments". If you use the minimal build profile (as is the case with jam -q haiku.image, for example), the DejaVu font is not installed. But if you use the "alpha" or "nightly" profiles, it is.

You can use AddHaikuImagePackages dejavu ; to add the font to your image, and it will be used by default.

In any case, Terminal should not end up using Bitstream Charter, it should pick a monospace font as long as one is available.

I built a minimal haiku image with some debug added in Terminal, and ran Terminal. I could reproduce the problem, and confirmed that Terminal uses the default monospace font. The problem is, that there is NO monospace font available (VL-Gothic is not a monospace font), as you can see in the screenshot I added here. As soon as you open the Terminal settings window, the code in there correctly scans for Fixed or Full-And-Half-Fixed fonts, and correctly chooses VL-Gothic. To fix this, I could add some code which, on Terminal initialization, chooses a random suitable font if the default monospace font is missing (no idea if this is possible). Otherwise, we could make sure that a default monospace font is always available.

[jackburton]

I added this code to Terminal initialization:

font_family family; font_style style; be_fixed_font->GetFontAndFamily(&family, &style); printf("family: %s, style: %s\n", family, style);

And the result is: family: BitStream Charter, style: Regular

[jackburton]

Fixed in hrev48823 . I added some code in PrefHandler, which checks if be_fixed_font isn't usable, and search for an usable font. This should always work, since VL-Gothic is a dependency of the haiku package.