I recently switched to Arch Linux from Ubuntu, and so to ease the switch, I've installed the GTK themes used by Ubuntu and switched to the Ubuntu font family across the system. However, there is a minor flaw with the clocks in the GNOME interface, such that all of the colons :
are replaced with tricolons ⁝
, which is starting to bother me a lot.
Could this possibly be caused by an improperly set locale setting, or is this likely a bug that I need to file on GNOME?
Edit 1: I installed the Ubuntu font family from ttf-ubuntu-font-family
in the Arch repos.
Best Answer
Well, this question sounded interesting to me so I did some digging...
Here is the gnome-clocks source code. From world-item.vala:
Ok. From Utils.vala:
Seems weird to me personally, but alright,
:
is replaced by"\xE2\x80\x8E\xE2\x88\xB6"
.I ran this on my system:
$ echo -e "\xE2\x80\x8E\xE2\x88\xB6"
and got:∶
Run it on yours and see what you get.
According to this website, the above sequence also converts to
:
. But what is:
? Copy it from the website and paste it here. Result:And now it's up to you to find out whether your font prints
RATIO
as a tricolon or if your locale is messed up and UTF-8 is handled incorrectly. I'm not on GNOME right now but I think you can enterU+2236
in the global GNOME search to look it up and copy it. If it results in a tricolon then I'd suggest to change your font and try again, if it results in a colon then it's definitely your font, if not most likely your locale/UTF-8 setup.Edit: In any textbox (e.g. the search on superuser) press CTRL+SHIFT+u, then enter
2236
and press enter. If it's a tricolon I'd blame your font.Edit2: I found an ubuntu font tester online and did the above mentioned key-combo on it. It results in a normal
:
colon for me. I double-checked, it is theRATIO
character...Can you please do me a favor and run the following command:
fc-match "∶"
- Make sure to copy it as the colon (tricolon?) is theRATIO
character. If it outputs the right (ubuntu) font then either that ubuntu font test website is wrong or drunk me is out of ideas...Edit3: Another easy way to check if it's the font or not: If the above
echo
command's result gives you a tricolon, try changing the terminal font and see if it becomes a colon. If you do get a colon on first try, change the font of the terminal to the same as the system font and see if it becomes a tricolon...Edit4: Trying the Ubuntu font here with the u+2236 character shows that indeed the Ubuntu font doesn't even contain the ratio symbol, so whichever font your system falls back to causes this issue.