[Solved] Konsole using less readable braille font for graphs

Eragon615 · 2023-04-02 02:16:04

So a lot of terminal utilities such as btop++ and bottom make use of braille characters to draw pretty graphs. On my fedora machine at work this works really well. But on my arch machine at home, they're much less readable as the the braille characters are printing all six dots with only some filled. See the screenshot below.

Ugly braille glyphs
Link to full image

I can't for the life of me figure out how to "fix" this (technically it's working, I'm sure as intended). Changing my terminal's font doesn't do anything. I've found one or two posts online talking about it, but I'm struggling to follow them.
Can anyone explain it in small words?

Oh, for reference here's how it's intended to look:
Pretty braille glyphs
Link to full image

EDIT: As explained in later posts, the terminal emulator seems to be the issue. Both Konsole and Alacritty display this way, where Kitty does not. So now I'm trying to understand how to make Konsole use the more desirable font.

Last edited by Eragon615 (2023-04-04 01:00:10)

Trilby · 2023-04-02 02:23:49

Do you have the same fonts installed (and the same font config) on both systems? Btop seems to work fine for me - and I have very limited fonts, though I do have a couple good general purpose fonts (e.g., DejaVu).

Eragon615 · 2023-04-02 02:39:05

They aren't exactly the same, no. Fedora comes with a lot of fonts, plus my job installs some additional non free fonts. You're saying yours is displaying the "correct" way? I just installed this machine with Arch, so I have the "stock" set of fonts, mostly Noto fonts. And changing which one my terminal is using seems to do nothing.

Trilby · 2023-04-02 03:19:51

There are no stock fonts. Certainly not noto fonts. Which instructions did you follow to install the system?

In any case, install a font with good glyph coverage like DejaVu and it will likely solve the problem.

Eragon615 · 2023-04-02 04:15:39

To be honest, this isn't my first encounter with this problem. It does the same thing on my desktop, I just haven't asked before since it was already installed and customized by the time I first used a terminal app with braille graphs. I brought it up now since my laptop is a fresh install. I used the archinstall command to install this laptop. My desktop was installed before that existed and I did it manually.

And unfortunately installing DejaVu did nothing. Even after setting it as my terminal font.

Last edited by Eragon615 (2023-04-02 04:26:48)

seth · 2023-04-02 08:09:53

fc-list :charset=2802
FC_DEBUG=4 pango-view --font="monospace" -t "⠂" | grep family:

It's resolved from DejaVuSans for me (and looks as you desire)
Since that'S a variable width font: what terminal emulator do you actually use on arch?

Also replace the oversized images and fix your subject to not suggest this to be an a11y problem when it's actually just about r/unixporn.

Eragon615 · 2023-04-02 16:32:04

I'm using Konsole, since I use the KDE desktop. Since you asked, I went ahead and tried alacritty as well, and kitty. Alacritty displayed like konsole, full braille blocks. However kitty displayed it as I was hoping. So I guess it's something the emulator does?

I wasn't sure how else to describe the problem, sorry if I gave anyone the wrong impression. Now that I know its emulator specific, I guess my question is how to make Konsole display braille characters a certain way.

As for the images, my apologies. I see now the forum has a size limit. Imgur was suggested for thumbnails so I'm working on getting signed up over there and will have this remedied as soon as I can. For some reason the sign up process is not sending me a verification code but I think it's my ad-blocker. I'll get it sorted out.

seth · 2023-04-02 17:29:04

Post the output of the commands I listed.

The subject is about resolving glyphs from an undesired font.
The particularly concerned glyphs being from the braille section is a detail relevant to the analysis (to know which glyphs to inspect), but not the problem (because it's no braille-specific)

Eragon615 · 2023-04-02 17:43:38

For the first command:

/usr/share/fonts/noto/NotoSansSymbols2-Regular.ttf: Noto Sans Symbols 2:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/gnu-free/FreeMono.otf: FreeMono:style=Regular,нормален,normal,obyčejné,Standard,µεσαία,Normaali,Normál,Normale,Standaard,Normalny,Обычный,Normálne,menengah,прямій,navadno,vidējs,normalusis,thường,Arrunta,सामान्य

And the second command was enough that I felt pastebin was warrented. https://pastebin.com/rsT7dnQm
Oh, and it also opened a windows showing a single braille glyph. The kind where all six dots are drawn and some are filled (it was tiny and couldn't be zoomed so I couldn't tell which characters it was.

seth · 2023-04-02 17:56:18

The glyph is resolved from free-mono, so simply get rid of that font
Notice that it's next to NotoSansSymbols2 the only font on your system to provide that glyph, so you do NOT have dejavu installed.

Eragon615 · 2023-04-02 20:21:47

Well I'll be darned. That did the trick. I'll mark this solved.

If you have a few more moments, what were those commands?
fc-list is maybe fontconfig list? It looks like maybe it returned which font was displaying the 2802 character? Maybe that's the braille character it printed to the screen?
And I recognize that FC_DEBUG is an environment variable, I'm guessing it just causes the pango-view command to print more verbose output? It did print a ton of crap.

If you don't have the time to explain it I'll google it. Thanks a ton for the help, you're right it's basically unixporn but it was driving me nuts.

seth · 2023-04-02 20:35:54

fc-list is maybe fontconfig list?

It lists the fonts known to fontconfig (optionally filtered, as in this case)

It looks like maybe it returned which font was displaying the 2802 character?

It lists which fonts provide this glyph (":charset=2802")

Maybe that's the braille character it printed to the screen?

Yes. u+2802, a random braille char I picked for this test.

And I recognize that FC_DEBUG is an environment variable, I'm guessing it just causes the pango-view command to print more verbose output?

Yes. It helps a bit to see how a major font rendering implementation selects the final glyph source (and I don't know a Qt equivalent)

Ftr, r/unixporn is a popular subreddit.

OboTheHobo · 2024-02-01 01:51:14

seth wrote:

The glyph is resolved from free-mono, so simply get rid of that font
Notice that it's next to NotoSansSymbols2 the only font on your system to provide that glyph, so you do NOT have dejavu installed.

Hey, found this forum post after having the same problem, and I too am having it resolve with free-mono instead of another. Problem is, I can't remove free-mono as it's a dependency for another program. How can I make fontconfig resolve the glyph using dejavu (or any other font for that matter) instead of free-mono without removing it?

seth · 2024-02-01 07:49:57

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Font_c … tion#Alias but afaict nothing in the repos depends on gnu-free-fonts and nothing should™ depend on any specific font either (meta-pacakges of font collections aside, obviously)

danger89 · 2025-01-09 22:27:22

I had the same issue with btop.

I installed the ttf-dejavu & ttf-dejavu-nerd packages. Followed by:

fc-cache

Restarted the terminal. And it works! No weird missing symbols when using btop.

Last edited by danger89 (2025-01-09 22:27:58)

Arch Linux

#1 2023-04-02 02:16:04

[Solved] Konsole using less readable braille font for graphs

#2 2023-04-02 02:23:49

Re: [Solved] Konsole using less readable braille font for graphs

#3 2023-04-02 02:39:05

Re: [Solved] Konsole using less readable braille font for graphs

#4 2023-04-02 03:19:51

Re: [Solved] Konsole using less readable braille font for graphs

#5 2023-04-02 04:15:39

Re: [Solved] Konsole using less readable braille font for graphs

#6 2023-04-02 08:09:53

Re: [Solved] Konsole using less readable braille font for graphs

#7 2023-04-02 16:32:04

Re: [Solved] Konsole using less readable braille font for graphs

#8 2023-04-02 17:29:04

Re: [Solved] Konsole using less readable braille font for graphs

#9 2023-04-02 17:43:38

Re: [Solved] Konsole using less readable braille font for graphs

#10 2023-04-02 17:56:18

Re: [Solved] Konsole using less readable braille font for graphs

#11 2023-04-02 20:21:47

Re: [Solved] Konsole using less readable braille font for graphs

#12 2023-04-02 20:35:54

Re: [Solved] Konsole using less readable braille font for graphs

#13 2024-02-01 01:51:14

Re: [Solved] Konsole using less readable braille font for graphs

#14 2024-02-01 07:49:57

Re: [Solved] Konsole using less readable braille font for graphs

#15 2025-01-09 22:27:22

Re: [Solved] Konsole using less readable braille font for graphs

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