Geany: Underscore not displayed on 20.04

[makitso]

Using Geany on Ubuntu Budgie 20.04 testing system. The underscore character does not show up. Work fine in gedit, etc.

[codebrainz]

Duplicate of #2386, #2353, #2287, and #1387 at least. All found within the top matches when searching issues, and also identified by the duplicate detector when submitting a new issue.

[bencaradocdavies]

@codebrainz all of these issues are closed. The bug still occurs. The documented workaround (line_height in filetypes.common) does not work. Update: see below for working workaround.

Confirmed on debian/sid amd64 with DejaVu Sans Mono Book size 12 from fonts-dejavu-core 2.37-1, antialiasing with full hinting and no subpixels, 96 dpi, and FREETYPE_PROPERTIES=truetype:interpreter-version=35 under Xfce4.

Update: for the record, I am using geany 1.36-1, libgtk-3-0 3.24.17-3, and libglib2.0-0 2.64.1-1 (debian/sid amd64).

This font works fine in xfce4-terminal, firefox, thunderbird, and every other editor I have tried, including intellij and godot. Only geany seems affected. This bug makes geany unusable for code and configuration files.

[elextr]

@bencaradocdavies you provide lots of information about your font setup, but nothing about your Geany version, GTK version etc so can't help you.

Also what did you set line_height to, my crystal ball has gone hazy, it must have COVIDS?

And just for the record with the default setup DejaVu Sans Mono Book 12 works just fine on my Linux Mint with line_height 0;0; (ie default) on Geany 1.37 (git >= 82590af4), en_AU.UTF-8 GTK 3.22.30, GLib 2.56.4.

[codebrainz]

@bencaradocdavies they're closed because the bug is not a Geany bug, which this issue tracker is for. If you look at the google search I mentioned in a comment, you'll see lots of bugs on various projects related to this font. If you have a reason to believe this is in fact a bug specific to Geany (ie. not the font itself or something in the text rendering stack; Freetype2, Pango, Gtk, Scintilla), we can re-open the original bug.

[bencaradocdavies]

Thanks @elextr and @codebrainz, I have updated my comment above with my geany, gtk, and glib details for the record, but I just got the line_height workaround to work with excellent results.

For the benefit of other users, the line_height setting can be found in "Tools" > "Configuration Files" > "filetypes.common". To change this setting from its default line_height=0;0; there are two things to note:

• #~ lines are commented and have no effect.
• The file format is an INI file so uncommenting the line_height line is insufficient because the [styling] section is also required; either uncomment this line or add a new [styling] section at the end.

The only uncommented lines in my filetypes.common are now:

[styling]
line_height=0;2;

With this setting and DejaVu Sans Mono Book size 12, underscores are visible. Using line_height=0;1; also works, but line_height=0;2; gives me, for the first time ever, exact agreement (as far as I can tell) with the line height in xfce4-terminal.

[bencaradocdavies]

I am going to to paste my solution into the other bugs for make benefit glorious nation of geany.

[bencaradocdavies]

Sigh. Apologies for the spam, but, given the number of users, myself included, unable to implement the documented fix, I thought circulating this recipe might do more good than harm. Thanks for your patience! And for geany, of course. :-)