Bug#548163: gucharmap: cannot view partial font

[Michal Suchanek]

Package: gucharmap
Version: 1:2.22.3-2
Severity: normal


Hello

I was seeing characters rendered so badly I was wondering if I have a
broken font or the application rendering the fonts is broken.

At first sight these characters would be from the Han range so I tried
looking at that range in gucharmap.

At first glance I can see that I do have a font with decent glyphs in
that range because every font has them in gucharmap .. but they are the
same for almost all fonts.

For example, the Sazanami fonts certainly should have some glyphs in Han
range but when I select Sazanami Gothic I get same Sung/Mincho glyphs
(not Gothic) as I do for fonts that are meant for Latin and probably do
not have any Han ideographs at all.
This applies pretty much for any font that sounds like it could be a CJK
font.

This is certainly a problem, the Han range is large and few fonts cover
it completely but it seems that gucharmap refuses to show Han glyphs from
fonts that do not cover the full range.

I guess this is not limited to Han range. Latin and Cyrillic ranges also
contain characters for multiple languages and if the font is developed
for a particular language it may miss a few glyphs in some range.

In Han this is most visible because it contains characters for both
Japanese and Chinese (and both traditional and simplified Chinese) and
some shared characters that are styled differently for each language so
authors of fonts for one language often do not bother to include
(hundreds of) glyphs used only in the other because the shared glyphs
would look wrong with the other language and nobody in their right mind
would suggest to use the font for both languages.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0.3
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (990, 'stable'), (500, 'testing'), (300, 'unstable'), (290, 'stable-i386'), (280, 'testing-i386'), (270, 'unstable-i386'), (1, 'experimental-i386'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.30-1-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages gucharmap depends on:
ii  gconf2                  2.26.2-3         GNOME configuration database syste
ii  libc6                   2.9-25           GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libglib2.0-0            2.20.5-1         The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgtk2.0-0             2.16.6-1         The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  libgtk2.0-bin           2.12.12-1~lenny1 The programs for the GTK+ graphica
ii  libgucharmap6           1:2.22.3-2       Unicode browser widget library (sh
ii  libpango1.0-0           1.24.5-1         Layout and rendering of internatio

Versions of packages gucharmap recommends:
pn  yelp                          <none>     (no description available)

gucharmap suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information