Box-drawing characters issue only in st (simple terminal)

alesandar · 2016-01-27 12:51:43

Hello,

I'm currently experiencing the following issue with st (the simple terminal developed by suckless).
Box-drawing characters (e.g. volume level bars in alsamixer) have a tiny vertical spacing between each other.

What I've done already:
-tested with different terminal emulators (xterm and rxvt-unicode) - the issue doesn't occur;
-according to the previous test, I've also tried to specify the same font that has been used by st for both of the aforestated terminals - the issue doesn't occur either;
-tried to toggle between even and odd pixel-sizing for st - still nothing;

I've used the following PKGBUILD. It was builded manually (makepkg -sfc; pacman -U st;)
I've also installed infinality-bundle and infinality-bundle-multilib.

The issue occurs on a really fresh environment. Maybe I've missed something, but if so - why st is the only terminal that complains about it?
I prefer st, rather than most of the other terminal emulators.
It's nothing serious, but still an issue and it may occur for different ncurses application.
Any ideas?

Here's my locale output:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

Here's an image:
http://i.imgur.com/0YnivUU.png

Mod Edit: Please post thumbnails instead of large pictures: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fo … s_and_code
(x33a)

The currently used font for the screenshot is simply Terminus from the official repository (not a powerline patched version).
Some other fonts (such as Deja Vu Sans Mono) used to look even worse.

Last edited by x33a (2016-01-29 05:12:14)

Head_on_a_Stick · 2016-01-27 13:04:59

You could try changing the kerning.

In config.h:

/* Kerning / character bounding-box multipliers */
static float cwscale = 1.0;
static float chscale = 1.0;

Reduce those values and recompile.

alesandar · 2016-01-27 13:25:54

I've decreased and recompiled for every 0.1 step, down to 0.5, but by reducing the values, it's turning even worse.
However, seems to be related, I guess. Thanks for the incredibly fast reply!

Head_on_a_Stick · 2016-01-27 13:31:35

alesandar wrote:

by reducing the values, it's turning even worse

Perhaps try increasing them then?

alesandar · 2016-01-27 13:37:06

Well, I've just tried that too, but seems like I can't get around it.
Also tried to play up and down only with the chscale, but the spacing is still there.
However, I find my console more readable by increasing the chscale just a little bit.
If it matters, my current resolution is 1920x1080.

alesandar · 2016-01-29 00:58:58

Okay, excuse me for the bump, but I've some distinct progress, even if I don't feel really satisfied with the solution I found. Liberation Mono prints the line-drawing characters almost perfect.

In the sake of testing, I've even installed xfce4-terminal, just to see what's going on there. Almost all of the fonts printed terrible line-drawing characters. Terminus was the only one that used to look almost fine.

I took some full-screen scrots of st with three different fonts, with normal and very large font-sizing for each one of them.

14px vs. 48px with Terminus.
14px vs. 48px with Deja Vu Sans Mono.
14px vs. 48px with Liberation Mono.

I'm not going to mark the thread as [Solved], at least until I figure out why Terminus looks fine in xfce4-terminal, but not in st.

Not a long time ago, I used to play around with rxvt-unicode and remember that there were some built-in glyphs there.
I know how to set a fallback font in st, but that will require the lack of glyphs in the original one, am I right?
What if I find or create a box-drawing font that won't occupy any other characters, then specify in config.h something like "Box-Drawing Font, Original Font" (where my original font will have the role of a fallback font and actually be used for everything else, but not the box-drawing glyphs)?
If it's possible, is it going to be a bloaty workaround, since st will always have to look for characters which are missed in the box-drawing font and then fall back to my prefered one?

einxor · 2016-01-31 22:00:23

Same here. I use st 0.6, neither setting font with X core font system nor Xft/fontconfig with a lot of different setting turns out to help. Have played with cwscale/chscale - it gets even worse. I have no Infinality or other mods installed. Tried with about 6 different fonts, Sans/Sans-serif/Monospace - it doesn't matter. Ready to post more info, screens if needed.

I like st a lot, but such a thing, eh, bothers me. Found some info, which may help: first section here, this and this.

alesandar · 2016-02-04 15:17:45

Hi, einxor. Would you mind to install the ttf-liberation package from the official repository and then run st -f "Liberation\ Mono:pixelsize=16" (instead of recompiling st), simply to confirm what happens with box-drawing dependent applications such as alsamixer?

einxor · 2016-02-04 19:19:03

That's... you know, weird haha. Here.

By the way, I switched to Termite, installed Infinality and everything works as it should. I'm tired of problems with st.

Arch Linux

#1 2016-01-27 12:51:43

Box-drawing characters issue only in st (simple terminal)

#2 2016-01-27 13:04:59

Re: Box-drawing characters issue only in st (simple terminal)

#3 2016-01-27 13:25:54

Re: Box-drawing characters issue only in st (simple terminal)

#4 2016-01-27 13:31:35

Re: Box-drawing characters issue only in st (simple terminal)

#5 2016-01-27 13:37:06

Re: Box-drawing characters issue only in st (simple terminal)

#6 2016-01-29 00:58:58

Re: Box-drawing characters issue only in st (simple terminal)

#7 2016-01-31 22:00:23

Re: Box-drawing characters issue only in st (simple terminal)

#8 2016-02-04 15:17:45

Re: Box-drawing characters issue only in st (simple terminal)

#9 2016-02-04 19:19:03

Re: Box-drawing characters issue only in st (simple terminal)

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