Pango version 1.44+ is a disaster

A couple of days ago, I posted about some fonts rendering as rectangular boxes in EasyOS built from packages compiled in OpenEmbedded:

https://bkhome.org/news/202009/first-bootup-easyos-dunfell-series.html

After a bit more research, I discovered that the culprit is Pango, version 1.44 onwards. Support for bitmap and Type1 fonts has been dropped.

I could live with that, I think, however, that problem turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. I discovered this in ROX-Filer:

...what is wrong with that? Hyphens are inserted at line-breaks. For example, file "freememapplet_tray" is showing as "freemem-applet_tr-ay". How misleading!!!!

It seems that individual applications can turn hyphenation off, so ROX-Filer would need to be patched. There does not seem to be global configuration setting to turn it off.

The problems don't end there. Pango 1.44+ has also stuffed up rendering of DejaVu fonts. With DejaVu Mono, a character with underscore will not show the underscore. In rxvt-unicode, the horizontal spacing between characters is huge.

Here are some relevant links:

https://github.com/linuxmint/nemo/issues/2214

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/-/issues/386

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/-/issues/392

https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2019/07/27/more-text-rendering-updates/

The version of Pango in OE Dunfell is 1.44.7, in Debian Buster it is 1.42.4.

Looking at the releases of OE/Yocto, going back in time from left to right:

Dunfell Zeus Warrior Thud Sumo Rocko Pyro

Pyro was released May 2017. Warrior has Pango 1.42.4, so I might use that recipe and do a complete recompile.  I hate to be going backwards, but it won't be the first time that I have done this (with other packages).

P.S. What annoys me more than anything else, is that the developer made these fundamental changes with only a minor-version bump.    

Tags: easy