Font-awesome: Font Awesome TTF >=5.0.11 is broken in some linux apps

Created on 8 May 2018 · 14Comments · Source: FortAwesome/Font-Awesome

Possibly related to #13044 (since that is also happening since 5.0.11)

Before (5.0.10):

bildschirmfoto vom 2018-05-08 10-02-52

After (5.0.11 - 5.3.1):

bildschirmfoto vom 2018-05-08 10-01-04

third-party bug

Source

jplatte

Most helpful comment

Fixed in pango 1.44: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/merge_requests/67

jplatte on 29 Jul 2019

👍2

All 14 comments

@jplatte is there any more information you can provide to help diagnose this? I did the work on those font file updates for 5.0.11 and it's not yet evident to me how those changes might give rise to those visual side effects in that status bar.

mlwilkerson on 16 May 2018

What _is_ evident is that those matrix looking things represent the unicode character 0020, which is space. So they were displaying as horizontal whitespace before (as expected), and now they are not.

mlwilkerson on 16 May 2018

Normally, the Font Awesome typeface should not be applied to a space character. (And I wonder what font i3bar is trying to apply to those space characters.) However, when I do apply Font Awesome 5 Free (v5.0.13, OTF) to space characters in TextEdit on MacOS, such as in "quick brown fox", the spaces appear correctly as simply whitespace.

@jplatte Are you confident that the versions of i3bar and its dependencies are the all the same before and after changing the Font Awesome version, such that the _only_ difference between the working earlier version and the broken later version is the change version of the Font Awesome OTF files?

mlwilkerson on 16 May 2018

Yes, I am confident that it is the Font Awesome update that causes this. I am running an up-to-date system with only the otf-font-awesome package pinned to 5.0.10 and it is working like it should.

jplatte on 17 May 2018

@mlwilkerson Is this just too much of a niche issue for it to be looked into? Can I provide any more information that would help track down the underlying problem?

jplatte on 8 Aug 2018

I can confirm this same issue... The awkward part is that it affects just some of the icons from Font Awesome, as shown on the picture. My current workaround, since I can't find a solution, is to keep the otf-font-awesome package at version 5.0.9-1 (from the ArchLinux repository).

nfraprado on 14 Sep 2018

As another bit of information about this: It's not only about the OTF, but also the TTF (which just isn't used by pango when an OTF is present). Removing the otf package and using the ttf package >= 5.0.11 results in the same issue.

@nfraprado 5.0.10 should also work. You can get the packages from the arch linux archive if you want to use that version too:

jplatte on 14 Sep 2018

Update: It's not both variations! It's only the TTF which causes this. This can be worked around by only installing otf-font-awesome (or uninstalling ttf-font-awesome).

jplatte on 11 Feb 2019

👍1

Not only {i3,sway,way}bar are affected. All programs are. This is gedit:

ttf-font-awesome-5.8.1-1:

otf-font-awesome-5.8.1-1:

I can see the same in geany.

v44r on 7 Apr 2019

Update: It's not both variations! It's only the TTF which causes this. This can be worked around by only installing otf-font-awesome (or uninstalling ttf-font-awesome).

Should we find/create a GTK bug then? Pango?