[Bug 1861340] Re: All bitmap fonts no longer visible after upgrade 19.10 -> Focal (development)

[Jonathan Hartley]

I succeeded with the process of converting a bitmap font into a vector
format with embedded bitmaps, which Pango will display. It took me hours
to figure out, so for anyone else:

Use fontforge, as described here:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/issues/386#note_570411

The gotcha is that once you've installed the resulting font, then it
displays invisibly in font selection dialogs. However, don't give up
there! If you click around blindly to select the font you want, then the
font displays correctly in gnome-terminal, including all size
variations, with bold and italic variants.

There is some residual weirdness in that selecting a font size that is
not defined in the bitmap (e.g. when using 'ctrl-+'), the terminal goes
completely blank instead of falling back to another font.

For me, using fonttosfnt, as also described in that thread, had many
serious issues (eg the resulting font only preserved the bitmap's
smallest size variant)

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1861340

Title:
  All bitmap fonts no longer visible after upgrade 19.10 -> Focal
  (development)

Status in Pango:
  Fix Released
Status in pango1.0 package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  For years I've installed a bitmap font for my terminals, but since I
  upgraded to Focal (development branch) today, it (and other bitmap
  fonts) no longer work.

  The font is 'Dina', from here:
  http://www.dcmembers.com/jibsen/download/61/?unapproved=504&moderation-hash=f1abb9d89caafa881dcfc05cd32372e7

  I have always installed it using a script:

      # install dina
      sudo mkdir -p /usr/share/fonts/Dina
      cd /usr/share/fonts/Dina
      sudo unzip ~/Downloads/Dina.zip

      # enable bitmap fonts
      sudo rm -f /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf

      # rebuild the cache
      fc-cache -f -v

      # Set as default mono font
      gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface monospace-font-name "Dina 8"

  This has always worked in the past, through many versions of Ubuntu,
  including 19.10.

  I installed Focal today, using `sudo do-release-upgrade -d`.

  Now the above script does not make Dina visible in font selectors such
  as that produced by the Tweaks / Fonts / [Monospace Text] button.
  Terminals that were previously configured to use that font now display
  the "box of hex digits" characters (what are they called?)

  gnome-font-viewer does not list any of the installed bitmap fonts.

  While trying to find a fix, I tried a few changes to the above script,
  which did not help:

  * Unzip to "$HOME/.fonts" instead
  * Trying other symlinks in the fonts config.d:

      (
          cd /etc/fonts/conf.d
          sudo rm -f 70-no-bitmaps.conf
          sudo ln -sf ../conf.avail/70-yes-bitmaps.conf
      )

    (tried with both 'yes-bitmaps' and 'force-bitmaps')
  * fc-cache -r # "really" force cache re-creation

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