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Bugfix monospaced glyph scaling #732

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merged 5 commits into from
Feb 5, 2022
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Finii
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@Finii Finii commented Dec 22, 2021

Description

Even when patched for Monospace (with -mono) fonts have a hard time to be recognized as monospaced font sometimes.

Requirements / Checklist

What does this Pull Request (PR) do?

The first commit just adds a warning mechanism, that shows us when an inserted glyph is not scaled in the expected way. Where expected means: Fits into the normal font width. We do not patch doublewidth glyphs in, jet (afaik).

Then the scaling mechanism (ScaleGlyph) is expanded to handle more complex situations and do so automatically.

This new mechanism is than used for the Font Awesome glyphs.

With just the first commit you can see the extend of the problem. Only Font Awesome is affected:

image

How should this be manually tested?

  • Patch a font that is not recognized as monospaced by some applications (like Gnome Terminal, Windows CMD, ...) and see if it is afterwards recognized.
  • Check glyphs from FONTA_SCALE_LIST in fontforge for example, if they scale to a reasonable size. They will be smaller then before, which is the goal of this, but people might notice.
  • Check font metadata, for example with
    • ttfdump FontName.ttf | grep 'advanceWidthMax|xAvgCharWidth'
    • showttf FontName.ttf | grep 'advanceWidthMax|avgWidth'

Keep in mind that this is just relevant for 'Nerd Font Mono' fonts, i.e. patched with -mono. Without the parameter the behavior of font-patcher is not changed.

Any background context you can provide?

Bottom of #695, for example #695 (comment)

Instead of taking ONE 'main glyph' that rules the scaling of all the special glyphs, we form groups of glyphs that have to be scaled together. Like all the selected (blue) glyphs here, but as individual groups:

image

The combined bounding box of the group is determined (like when all glyphs in the group are stamped on top of each other and then the bounding box is found), and all members of the group are scaled such that the combined bounding box is maximized to the allowed limits.

For example the group of four arrows (in line 5) is scaled together, but independently to all other glyphs.

Here an example that shows how Font Awesome is ... buggy strange, the selected (blue) glyphs are clearly too big for the font itself, that does maintain good glyph size consistency otherwise.

image

What are the relevant tickets (if any)?

For example #703 (part of)

Screenshots (if appropriate or helpful)

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Finii commented Dec 22, 2021

I tried to track down when this first occured. But even when ScaleGlyph has been only that, one glyph (and not a dict that contains a lot of information, and ALL glyphs have been scaled by the ScaleGlyph, already then the very problematic glyphs (mars, venus, merkur, etc) were there and were too big.

So obviously this has never been checked. This is one reason why the runtime check-and-warning is introduced.

Furthermore this PR is rather big (in code change), unfortunately. There is only one symbol font, and only 24 (?) glyphs that are affected, so the question is legitimate: Do we want such a big change.

Alternatively one could add Font Awesome piecewise, with different 'ordinary' ScaleGlyphs. But all in all that is not easier to comprehend, and so I ditched that way (and the commits). This is a hard decision, because for me it is a question of maintainability and understand-ability of the code, and it is not clear what is better (for 24 glyphs 😭). In the end my choice fell on the more complex data structure but more straight forward definition and use. But of course we can also have a look on the other design choice and or develop a completely different approach (that I could not come up with).

Ugg, I just see that the CI does not run through... Python version stuff I presume, will fix typo

@Finii Finii force-pushed the bugfix/monospaced-glyph-scaling branch from 424c9ac to 322c9f6 Compare December 22, 2021 11:19
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Finii commented Dec 22, 2021

This exposes a scaling glitch that is in font-patcher:

image

These are glyphs that are not in the ScaleGlyph set. I guess the reason is some rounding issue, still investigating.

Edit: Ah, and this 1233 (actual glyph width) is not rounded up, but is in fact 1233.7 or something, while our target is 1232.0.

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Finii commented Dec 22, 2021

Scaling glitch fixed with a7f91ac

The errors were always there, just invisible because we did not check :-D

This PR is now ready :-)

@Finii Finii added the Bug fix label Dec 22, 2021
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Finii commented Dec 22, 2021

$ fontforge --script ~/git/nerd-fonts/font-patcher --mono --complete ~/Download/Overpass_Mono/static/OverpassMono-Regular.ttf

Left side: before this PR, right side after this PR.

Gender / planet glyphs rescaled smaller (and independent from other glyphs):

image

Rounding error fix of non-ScaleGlyph-Glyph:

image

Metadata diagnostics:

$ ttfdump Overpass\ Mono\ Regular\ Nerd\ Font\ Complete\ Mono_prior.ttf | grep 'advanceWidthMax|xAvgCharWidth' 
	 advanceWidthMax:		 1517
	 xAvgCharWidth:		 1232
$ ttfdump Overpass\ Mono\ Regular\ Nerd\ Font\ Complete\ Mono_after.ttf | grep 'advanceWidthMax|xAvgCharWidth'
	 advanceWidthMax:		 1257
	 xAvgCharWidth:		 1232

Note: 1232 * 1.02 = 1256.6 (for overlap 2% on powerline stuff)

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@Finii Finii force-pushed the bugfix/monospaced-glyph-scaling branch from ed0e270 to 363c7d4 Compare January 1, 2022 00:23
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Finii commented Jan 1, 2022

Force push to remove merge-commit and do instead a rebase on master.

Finii added 5 commits January 1, 2022 01:43
[why]
Sometimes fonts patched with --mono are not recognized as monospaced
fonts.

One reason can be that the inserted glyphs are too wide. This will show
in the end in the font's advanceWidthMax property which is not congruent
to the normal font width.

[how]
After all the scaling and jiggling we double check if the new glyph
already in the to-be-patched is not wider than our design goal for the
width. Normally one would expect that this always holds.

An exemption could be if we insert ligatures, that are two spaces wide.
But at the moment we can not anyhow (because there is no way to add
information to the ligature tables right now).

If a glyph is wider a warning is issued.

No warning is issued if the glyph shall have some overlap. That overlap
is taken into account of this check.

Signed-off-by: Fini Jastrow <[email protected]>
[why]
While patching for --mono with Font Awesome we get glyphs that are
too wide, for example '_520' (0xF22B). In the symbol font original
it is about 1918 wide. According to ScaleGlyph FONTA_SCALE_LIST
it shall be scaled as 0xF17A - which is only 1664 wide.

This results in too wide symbols in the patched font.

[how]
The ScaleGlyph dict works like this:
- 'ScaleGlyph' Lead glyph, which scaling factor is taken
- 'GlyphsToScale': List of (glyph code) or (list of two glyph codes
      that form a closed range)) that shall be scaled

Note that this allows only one group for the whole symbol font, and
that the scaling factor is defined by a specific character, which
needs to be manually selected (on each symbol font update).

The redesign drops 'ScaleGlyph' and changes the glyph list to:
- 'GlyphsToScale': List of ((lists of glyph codes) or (ranges of glyph codes)) that shall be scaled

Each item in 'GlyphsToScale' (a range or an explicit list) forms a group of glyphs that shall be
as rescaled all with the same and maximum possible (for the included glyphs) factor.

The old data structure is automatically rewritten to new entries.

[note]
This commit just changes the algorithm. As the new ScaleGlyph is not
used for any font, there is no change in the patched fonts.

Signed-off-by: Fini Jastrow <[email protected]>
[why]
While patching for --mono with Font Awesome we get glyphs that are
too wide, for example '_520' (0xF22B). In the symbol font original
it is about 1918 wide. According to ScaleGlyph FONTA_SCALE_LIST
it shall be scaled as 0xF17A - which is only 1664 wide.

[how]
Fill the ScaleGlyph of Font Awesome with groups of glyphs that shall be
kept same-sized after scaling.

Signed-off-by: Fini Jastrow <[email protected]>
[why]
The ScaleGlyph just gives a lot of anonymous numbers.

[how]
Write down which glyphs are rescaled and group them to related
groups.

They are not changed to 'new' ScaleGlyph method.

[note]
Checked the current Devicons, and they are completely different to ours.

Signed-off-by: Fini Jastrow <[email protected]>
[why]
The symbol glyphs are rescaled (when --mono is specified) so that they
have a predefined width after insertion in the source font (to be
patched font, called 'target font' below).

Sometimes the width of the glyph after insertion is off a bit, like
0.2% or so. This seems strange, as we calculate the target width
exactly.

[how]
As expected this are rounding errors. In the old code we take the
original width of the glyph when it is in the symbol font and
rescale it when it is in the target font. The width of the glyph
should be the same in the source and the target font, right?

It fact it is not, because the coordinate systems of the two fonts can
(and usually are) different. fontforge's magic scales the glyph
into the new coordinate system on insertion, such that it is approx
the same as before. But when the coordinate system is integer based
we get some small rounding errors just from copy and paste.

To solve this, we
- first copy the glyph from the source into the target font
- then determine the glyphs width
- then rescale the glyph to the target width

Signed-off-by: Fini Jastrow <[email protected]>
@Finii Finii force-pushed the bugfix/monospaced-glyph-scaling branch from 363c7d4 to e805b87 Compare January 1, 2022 00:53
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Finii commented Jan 1, 2022

Ah, git tricked me also... Did the rebase again with git am and now we have it.
Force push.

Also changed the stuff from the review above.

@ryanoasis
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I meant to do a final review/test this weekend... maybe this week 🤞🏻

@ryanoasis ryanoasis added this to the v2.2.0 milestone Jan 10, 2022
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code change and results in fontforge look good. The font I tested (3270) still didn't show up in my Virtualbox Windows 10 cmd but the results in Konsole were promising. I think is good enough to merge. Thanks!

@ryanoasis ryanoasis merged commit 2ca9c16 into master Feb 5, 2022
@ryanoasis ryanoasis deleted the bugfix/monospaced-glyph-scaling branch February 5, 2022 17:44
LNKLEO pushed a commit to LNKLEO/Nerd that referenced this pull request Nov 24, 2023
…ph-scaling

Bugfix monospaced glyph scaling
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