Bugzilla – Bug 54176
better default font for gnome terminal
Last modified: 2006-02-23 11:48:13 UTC
the GNOME terminal default font is rather weak; starting yast (ncurses) inside of it hurts your eyes. it looks like courier (very thin and l/1 hard to distinguish). I vote to go for "ETL fixed".
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Yes, ETL fixed looks much better. Can we assume that ETL fixed will stay in future products and is available on all products?
For sure, I don't know - I guess, it will stay.
It's still an issue on 9.3-preview4
This was reported and patched in stream. I'll patch today along with some patches from what will become 1.4.3 http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=161404
blarg, wrong bug.
Thanks - you meant bug 65960 ;) AFAIK, Monday will the last day when we are allowed to do version updates for SL 9.3 (FYI).
Assigning to myself. I'll be updating our VTE package. Gnome-terminal uses the system's monospace font by default, that is, the one you configured in the control center's gnome-font-properties. I think this simply comes from fontconfig's default matching for "monospace", which is Andale Mono. Gnome stores the font in the "/desktop/gnome/interface/monospace_font_name" GConf key.
... the default for that GConf key lives in libgnome. What font do we want to use? Bitstream Vera Sans Mono works very nicely for me. I don't think changing the default matching in fontconfig is a good idea. Let's just change it in Gnome for now.
Created attachment 30217 [details] Patch for libgnome which uses Bitstream Vera Sans 10 as the default monospace font for terminals
Submitted to autobuild.
Thanks heaps, Gary :)
Thanks for looking into this problem. Unfortunately, even with "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono 10" (=System Terminal Font), it is not possible to run YaST (ncurses) inside the Gnome terminal. With "ETL Fixed 12" contrasts are a little bit better. I leave it to QA to check this issue.
Reopen because of bug #152490.
*** Bug 152490 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Using "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono" as the default terminal font in Gnome causes a problem for Greek (and for Russian and some other languages as well). "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono" does contain neither Greek nor Cyrillic glyphs, therefore gnome-terminal has to look for fallback fonts for these languages. The fallback fonts it comes up with don't fit in style with "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono" at all, the combination looks very ugly. (See the screen shot in bug #152490).
Created attachment 69764 [details] libgnome-default-monospace-font.diff Changed patch to use "DejaVu Sans Mono" as the default monospace font.
Created attachment 69768 [details] gnome-terminal-greek-dejavu.png Screen shot of gnome-terminal using "DejaVu Sans Mono". The Greek glyphs are not perfect (the ? looks a bit ugly) but at least they fit in style to the Latin glyphs.
Created attachment 69769 [details] gnome-terminal-greek-cumberland.png Screen shot of gnome-terminal using "Cumberland AMT". Looks even better for Greek than "DejaVu Sans Mono".
As the screen shots from comments #18 and #19 demonstrate, one usually gets best results for the current language when using the "monospace" alias. Therefore I think not patching the default at all and using the upstream default "monospace" is best. But apparently Karl didn't like Cumberland AMT.
Let's not try to make everyone happy; just switch the default back to using Monospace. If that gives a reasonably good experience out of the box to both latin and greek users, I'm fine with it. Feel free to commit that patch.
yes, this b/w examples are okay. Users interested in ncurses applications can switch to xterm.
(In reply to comment #22) > yes, this b/w examples are okay. Users interested in ncurses applications can > switch to xterm. What's the problem with ncurses apps in gnome-terminal? MC works fine for me, for instance.
Then yast must switch the the color scheme MC is using. Otherwise it's mostly unreadable. I attach a screen shot.
Created attachment 69839 [details] xterm in the bg; gnome-terminal in fg
ok, on my TFT it is readable, but on my CRT connected to a test system you have a hard time.
(In reply to comment #24) > Then yast must switch the the color scheme MC is using. Otherwise it's mostly > unreadable. I attach a screen shot. Ah. The problem you have there is not the font, but the color set. Go to gnome-terminal's Edit/Current Profile/Colors. If you have "Linux Console" selected for the "built-in schemes", click on the top-right color button (the one for gray), and make it bright white. See if that improves things.
I'd say this Courier like font is simply too light - perhaps a personal ideosyncrasy. I like "Cumberland AMT" more "DejaVu Sans Mono" (Courier like).
These courier like fonts are not really lighter than the ETL bitmap fonts. I think this is a problem with antialiasing fonts on dark backgrounds.
No, sorry, it is not the anti-aliasing, it is really something with the colour palette. The glyphs in Karl's screen shot of gnome-terminal are gray, not white. In the xterm at the top left in Karl's screen shot the glyphs are white. That makes the difference in readability.
Federicos comment #27 is right, making the top-right color bright white really improves readability.
Submitted to STABLE. Closing as FIXED. (the problem with the colour palette is something different). ------------------------------------------------------------------- Thu Feb 23 12:28:46 CET 2006 - mfabian@suse.de - Bugzilla #54176: remove libgnome-default-monospace-font.diff, the upstream default "monospace" guarantees an acceptable result for the language set in the locale environment. Using "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono" as the default monospace font cause problems for example for Greek because the fallback glyphs used for Greek don't look nice together with "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono". -------------------------------------------------------------------