I use the bitmap font "Console" (filename console8x16.pcf.gz) in Konsole. This font seems to lack many Unicode characters. In KDE 4.3 and earlier versions, when attempting to display a Unicode character, Konsole would fall back to a different font for those characters not present in "Console". However, since I ran a system update (on Arch Linux) yesterday and got KDE SC 4.4.0, it seems to be displaying only placeholders for characters not in the "Console" font.

Here is an example screenshot from KDE 3.5.9 on Debian Lenny:


And here is an example from KDE SC 4.4.0 on Arch Linux:


Does anyone know what might might be causing the difference? And, is it possible to get back the old behavior? (The lack of font-fallback is bad for use with some programs, such as wget, which use the Unicode curly-quote characters.)

If this behaviour existed in KDE 4.3 and causes breakages such as this, I would consider it a regression, please file a bug report at bugs.kde.org.

I tried using qtconfig to configure the font substitution. I tried to add Dejavu Sans and VL Gothic to the list of substitutions for Console. It added this line to the section [qt] of the file $HOME/.config/Trolltech.conf:

Code: Select all

Font%20Substitutions\console=dejavu sans mono, vl gothic

However, that made no difference in the behavior of Konsole, and what's more, when I ran qtconfig again, it did not display the list of substitutions for Console.

So, is this possibly a bug in Qt 4.6.1?

If this works with Qt 4.5 or earlier, then it is a regression in Qt, yes.

As of Qt 4.8.0, it appears that this problem has been fixed, sort of:



(This screenshot is from Konsole 4.7.4 running on kdelibs 4.7.4 and Qt 4.8.0. I believe that it begin appearing this way was when I updated Qt to 4.8.0.)

However, as you can see, it now has a different problem: the characters are a few pixels lower than they're supposed to be, and parts of them get cut off. For example, the _ character gets cut off entirely so it looks like a space, and the tails of g and q get cut off so they look identical.

I tried it with a few other fonts (such as "DejaVu Sans Mono" and "Liberation Mono"), and it didn't have the problem with those, so I suppose that it's a Qt bug that only causes problems when using bitmap fonts.

Have you filed a report on bugs.kde.org regarding that possible Qt bitmap font bug?

bcooksley wrote:Have you filed a report on bugs.kde.org regarding that possible Qt bitmap font bug?

Just now, I filed a report on the Qt bug tracker, because I'm guessing that it's actually a bug in Qt: https://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/browse/QTBUG-23630