Ubuntu – Doesn’t KDE see the bold version of Droid Sans Monospace, but GNOME does

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I'm trying to set all my terminals to use the Droid Sans Monospace font from the package ttf-droid. In GNOME, this works perfectly, but KDE's Konsole does not seem to see the bold version of the font. When I look in the font settings, the bold and bold oblique versions of the font do not show up in the list. Why can't KDE find the bold version of Droid Sans Mono?

I'm asking on this website because the answer may lie in the way the Droid fonts or KDE were packaged for Ubuntu, so the answer may be Ubuntu-specific.

Best Answer

I could be wrong, but I don't believe there are Bold variants of the Droid Sans Mono font (just Droid Serif and Droid Sans; see here. The package I have installed certainly doesn't have bold versions. What you are seeing are probably "fake bold", made by darkening the usual versions algorithmically. I'm not a KDE/Konsole user, but I suspect it (really, probably Qt) does not have the capacity for creaking fake bolds, but perhaps Gtk/GNOME/gnome-terminal does.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – change the Linux console (Ctrl+Alt+F1) font to Ubuntu Mono

By joining the font beta testing team, the PPA details given in the sign-up email let you enable a Personal Package Archive that contains:

fonts-ubuntu-font-family-console ("Ubuntu Font Family Linux console fonts, sans-serif monospace")

after enabling the PPA you can do:

Ctrl+Alt+F1
sudo apt-get install fonts-ubuntu-font-family-console
setfont /usr/share/consolefonts/UbuntuMono-R-8x16.psf

Note that the font hinting that enables the bitmap generation is still a work-in-progress by Vincent Connare at Dalton Maag. Please give feedback about the look of the 8×16 rendering to bitmaps and how they could be improved at:

launchpad.net/ubuntu-font-family/+filebug?field.title=Mono: 16ppem Hinting: ...

PPEM means "pixel per em" and is the number of pixels allocated to the design square when rendering at any size. For the Linux/VGA console this is 16 pixels high. For your question about the tools involved (after the instructing/hinting has been done), the tools are:

otf2bdf
bdf2psf

If you apt-get source ttf-ubuntu-font-family in Ubuntu 11.10 beta, then the code already exists in the debian/console/* source directory (just type make). >This was disabled for the moment because the two small utilities listed above are in Universe, rather than Ubuntu's main component and will need Main Inclusion Reports first.

The bug to follow and add your comments to is:

Bug #861334 ("Ship Ubuntu Mono .psf as default console font in Ubuntu 11.10")

Because of the extreme deadlines involved, it is not likely to happen by default until the next release cycle of Ubuntu (after which Vincent will have had a chance to incrementally tweak the hinting work too!).

Ubuntu – How to prevent “automatic” bold version of a font to be wider than regular having the same pt size

mbaitoff, I'm posting this as addition to your update, not as an answer

If user creates file named ~/.fonts.conf:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
    <match target="font">
        <test name="spacing" compare="eq">
            <const>mono</const>
        </test>
        <edit name="embolden" mode="assign">
            <bool>false</bool>
        </edit>
    </match>
</fontconfig>

then, applications can use bold monospaced font if available, and disable "synthetic boldification" if used font does not have bold typeface.

It is just alternative, and slightly different approach with different result

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – change the Linux console (Ctrl+Alt+F1) font to Ubuntu Mono

Ubuntu – How to prevent “automatic” bold version of a font to be wider than regular having the same pt size

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