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Request for comments/brainstorms: making glyphs look better in gnome-terminal - #12

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@oconnor663

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These were the changes that I found made the powerline special characters look good in gnome-terminal (Ubuntu Mono 15, Ubuntu-patched rendering libs, Arch Linux). I can already see how fragile this is -- it doesn't look good if I so much as change the font to Deja Vu Mono, much less the OS. (Seems to survive font size changes though.) The command I'm using to generate the symbols TTF file is:

fontforge -lang ff -c 'Open($1); Generate($2)' powerline-symbols.sfd powerline-symbols.ttf

This isn't appropriate to actually merge, but I'm posting it to get advice. Is FontForge tweaking the way people are expected to get powerline to look good on their platform? Should we think about building a collection of platform-specific patched fonts?

image

The powerline glyphs don't seem to render properly in gnome-terminal
under any distro. I'm not sure why. I posted questions that might get
answered in the future:

- https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/powerline-support/mTIsGWW34U0
- powerline/fonts#31 (comment)

In the meantime, these changes seem to make the glyphs render better.
Note that I'm testing this in gnome-terminal on Arch with the
ubuntu-patched freetype2/fontconfig/cairo libraries. I can already tell
that e.g. Konsole renders things differently.

Here's the command to generate a TTF file (which goes in ~/.fonts):

fontforge -lang ff -c 'Open($1); Generate($2)' powerline-symbols.sfd powerline-symbols.ttf
@trusktr

trusktr commented Aug 2, 2015

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Cool, I'm half Peruvian. :)

@oconnor663

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Nice :) That's my clone of https://github.com/buildinspace/peru.

@kz-fox

kz-fox commented Nov 2, 2015

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Just as an addition, using Konsole on Ubuntu also has the alignment bug, and this fixes it there as well. It probably has to do with the Ubuntu font patches. Maybe the script needs to have some arguments added for platform specific issues, or font-specific fixes.

@oconnor663

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For what it's worth, I've noticed my left-pointing arrow is too short on the top and the bottom. More tweaks needed.

@italomaia

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Dummy proof tutorial, please?

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10 participants