Bug 49305 (suse34305)

Summary: xterm can only use exactly matching pairs of single width/double width fonts
Product: [openSUSE] SUSE LINUX 10.0 Reporter: Mike Fabian <mfabian>
Component: X11 ApplicationsAssignee: Mike Fabian <mfabian>
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX QA Contact: E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity: Enhancement    
Priority: P3 - Medium CC: dickey, meissner, mined, ms, sndirsch, stephan.barth
Version: Beta 2   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Found By: Other Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Mike Fabian 2004-02-04 20:08:05 UTC
Comment 1 Mike Fabian 2004-02-04 20:17:49 UTC 
xterm is very picky about which pairs of fonts it can use
together as a single width and a double width font.
For example, when trying to use the very popular 10x20 font

    -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--20-200-75-75-c-100-iso8859-1

as a single width font together with

    -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-18-120-100-100-c-180-iso10646-1

as the double width font, it will not work well.
One will get overlapping glyphs and garbare when moving the cursor.

xterm needs the double width font *exactly* twice as wide
as the single width font and requires also that both have the
same height.

mlterm is less picky about not perfectly matching combinations
and can pad the fonts a little bit to make it work.

For example, when trying to use a 10x20 font for single with with a
18x18 font for double width, mlterm will put the glyphs of
the 18x18 font into the lower left corner of 20x20 boxes and add
a little bit of padding at the top and the right edges.

2 pixel of padding are hardly noticable, at least it is far
better then seeing the garbage caused by the overlapping. 

It would be nice if xterm could do this as well because this would
greatly increase the useful combinations of fonts.
Comment 2 Stefan Dirsch 2004-03-27 07:17:26 UTC 
Isn't this an enhancement?
Comment 3 Mike Fabian 2005-08-23 10:19:54 UTC 
Add xterm author Thomas Dickey <dickey@herndon4.his.com> to CC:.
Comment 4 Thomas Dickey 2005-08-26 19:14:29 UTC 
That's an enhancement (doable, but not just a few lines of code).
I seem to recall someone suggesting it recently, but don't see
it in my recent email.
Comment 5 Mike Fabian 2005-10-06 12:40:18 UTC 
As a temporary workaround to make the very popular 10x20 font
usable with CJK I added 20x20{ja,ko} fonts generated from
18x18{ja,ko} with the script "bdf18to20" from the mined package
to the xterm package.

Will be removed again as soon as xterm becomes able
to do such padding on the fly.
Comment 7 Mike Fabian 2007-01-17 04:07:24 UTC 
→ LATER.
Comment 8 Stephan Kulow 2008-06-25 09:29:18 UTC 
mass reopening all SuSE Linux bugs that are set to REMIND+LATER to change the resolution to WONTFIX (adapting to new policy)
Comment 9 Stephan Kulow 2008-06-25 09:30:55 UTC 
mass reopening all SuSE Linux bugs that are set to REMIND+LATER to change the resolution to WONTFIX (adapting to new policy)
Comment 10 Stephan Kulow 2008-06-25 09:36:31 UTC 
mass reopening all SuSE Linux bugs that are set to REMIND+LATER to change the resolution to WONTFIX (adapting to new policy)
Comment 11 Stephan Kulow 2008-06-25 09:48:16 UTC 
Closing old LATER+REMIND bugs as WONTFIX - if you still plan to work on it, feel free to reopen and set to ASSIGNED.

In case the report saw repeated reopen comments, it's due to bugzilla timing out on the huge request ;(