Re: fonts in gtk-2.0/pango

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>]

On 1 Aug 2002, Gustavo Giráldez wrote:

> On Mon, 2002-07-29 at 11:16, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> > On 29 Jul 2002, Sven Neumann wrote:
> >
> > > > and I assumed that was what the function was returning.  But the
> > > > value is wrong: it is given as 8 by
> > > > pango_font_metrics_get_approximate_char_width() while in fact it is
> > > > 7.  This is for Lucidatypewriter 10, where the glyphs themselves are
> > > > of various widths but are all padded to give an advance of 7 pixels.
> > >
> > > which Pango backend did you use to obtain this result? I know that at
> > > least the FT2 and Xft backends calculate the approximate char width by
> > > measuring the length of an example string and dividing the result by
> > > the number of characters in the string. I don't see how this could
> > > lead to wrong results for a monospace fonts.
>
> I had a problem which I can relate to this.  Using a monospaced font in
> a GtkTextView would lead to inaccurate character positions (e.g. a tab
> wasn't 8 characters width, but more like 8.5) and looked really bad.  I
> solved the problem upgrading freetype from 2.0.6 to 2.0.9.  Maybe this
> is the case?

Thank you for putting me onto the right track.  It was a freetype
problem for me too, but in my case the problem was that the freetype
version was too recent (version 2.1.2) rather than too old.  After
installing 2.0.9 I get the correct font metrics.  It would be nice if
pango's configure script gave an error message when one tries to build
against freetype 2.1.2.

Allin Cottrell.