Removal of revert_scalable_fonts_metric.patch causes ugliness in Claws-Mail

for me this change makes the terminal experience much worse, can't fit as wide terminals on the screen as before

so is this a font bug now?

So looks like on my laptop the terminal looks fine, but on my desktop (2560x1400) the monospace font size 8 & 9 are equally wide, and 8 is what I use so the end result is ugly. 7 is way too small. Laptop (3200x1800) uses size 9, and changing to size 8 the width changes too.

FWIW, and unsurprisingly, the claws-mail mailing list doesn't think there's a bug in that application. I've had to change fonts to Droid Sans 11 for folders and message lists, and Ubuntu Mono 13 for the message window. It's not what I want, but it's tolerable.

I have noticed other geometry changes with gnome terminal and Emacs, and have had to adjust some settings, but so far I haven't had to actually change the font of either of them. I understand the rationale for backing this patch out, but it does seem to have some negative side-effects for me. My understanding is that the patch caused problems for other people though. I suspect we'll have to wait (perhaps in vain) for a font expert to dig into the issue.

re-adding the patch gave me the terminal font I want, maximized terminator with four columns 101x107 each (broken one had 87x107..).. I'll use this until something provided by the distro works for me.

another visual regression is thicker underlines in thunderbird showing threads with unread messages, patched version is good

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

This broke the rendering of Input font for me.

Right, so the release went ahead without dealing with this issue.

Yes, it's unfortunate. I've had to config away from Ubuntu Mono font in Claws because it was just unreadable. I've managed to keep it in gnome-terminal and Emacs though.

This bug is also affecting Code::Blocks. The default monospace font (DejaVu Sans Mono, 10pt) is now rendered with slightly less height which makes all of the code look like it has been squished vertically. It's particularly obvious with the = signs which are now so squished it's difficult to make out the separate lines.

Same in Eclipse.

One more detail: setting font size to 10.5 makes udnerscore symbol invisible.
Should I open new ticket?

This has been fixed upstream: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/freetype/freetype2.git/commit/src/truetype/ttdriver.c?id=bcc74f4dafee25ea89f1d3144646cba7e30f9908

The fix is included in freetype 2.8+.

Fixed in Artful and Bionic.