Bug#549953: xterm excessive character spacing
This is indeed a feature of xterm-249; turning off the "Packed Font"
option (accessible from the Ctrl-mouse3 menu) causes an individual xterm
to behave normally. This is strange, because the Packed Font option is
documented as using the minimum width instead of the maximum, for use
with proportional fonts.
The determination of "minimum width" seems to be made in the checkXft
routine in fontutils.c, which appears to be taking the *maximum* width
of characters in the 32..127 and 159..255 ranges. It is not clear if
this is intentional; by contrast, the "maximum width" appears to be
derived from the font's declared metrics.
I've found that, for "DejaVu Sans Mono:pixelsize=10", the overly wide
characters are 0xD8 and 0xF8, the capital and lowercase "o with stroke";
if they are excluded (by editing the conditional on line 1568), the xterm
behaves normally with that particular font.
There doesn't appear to be a documented X resource or flag for reverting
to the old behavior, but a workaround of sorts can be had by editing line
1567 of fontutils.c to change the 256 to a smaller number (e.g., 128) and
rebuilding the xterm package.
--Jed
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