Bug#350981: gnome-terminal: font substitution seems broken: missing characters appear as squares

[Thomer M. Gil]

Package: gnome-terminal
Version: 2.12.0-2
Severity: normal
Tags: l10n


Knowing full well that I'm an idiot when it comes to fonts and
fontconfig (and life in general), I feel I should point out that font
substitution seems broken in gnome-terminal.

When I configure gnome-terminal to use Monospace 10, I would expect it
to use Bitstream Vera Sans Mono (that's how Monospace seems defined in
/etc/fonts/fonts.conf and I don't have /etc/fonts/local.conf or
~/.fonts.conf).  That is the case.  However, if a certain character is
missing from Bitstream Vera Sans Mono (say, the characters for card
suits, or Hebrew characters), I would expect it to fall back to Andale
Mono first (where the card suits are defined) or Courier New after that
(where Hebrew characters are defined).  This isn't the case.  Instead, I
get a dreaded little square.  Very consistently (and very square).

gucharmap happily displays the characters.  If I choose Bitstream Vera
Sans Mono as my font, it does the font substitution correctly
(right-clicking a font gives me the name of a non-Vera font).  Same deal
with gedit: pasting Hebrew characters in a Monospace document uses the
Courier New font.  All fine.

FYI.  The Terminal -> Set Charater Encoding option is set to Current
Local (UTF-8).

This is with libfontconfig1 (and fontconfig) version 2.3.2-1.1.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.15
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

Versions of packages gnome-terminal depends on:
ii  gnome-control-center      1:2.12.2-2     utilities to configure the GNOME d
ii  gnome-terminal-data       2.12.0-2       Data files for the GNOME terminal 
ii  libatk1.0-0               1.10.3-1       The ATK accessibility toolkit
ii  libbonobo2-0              2.10.1-1       Bonobo CORBA interfaces library
ii  libc6                     2.3.5-12       GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  libgconf2-4               2.12.1-8       GNOME configuration database syste
ii  libglade2-0               1:2.5.1-2      library to load .glade files at ru
ii  libglib2.0-0              2.8.6-1        The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgnome2-0               2.12.0.1-5     The GNOME 2 library - runtime file
ii  libgnomeui-0              2.12.0-2       The GNOME 2 libraries (User Interf
ii  libgtk2.0-0               2.8.10-1       The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  liborbit2                 1:2.12.4-1     libraries for ORBit2 - a CORBA ORB
ii  libpango1.0-0             1.10.2-1       Layout and rendering of internatio
ii  libpopt0                  1.7-5          lib for parsing cmdline parameters
ii  libstartup-notification0  0.8-1          library for program launch feedbac
ii  libvte4                   1:0.11.17-1    Terminal emulator widget for GTK+ 
ii  libx11-6                  6.9.0.dfsg.1-4 X Window System protocol client li
ii  scrollkeeper              0.3.14-10      A free electronic cataloging syste

Versions of packages gnome-terminal recommends:
ii  yelp                          2.12.2-2   Help browser for GNOME 2

-- debconf-show failed