Mono: Not all box drawing characters are mapped

For the record, those are glyphs 1250--1262 in glyph ordering. They're all named as *alternates* for the appropriate code points (e.g., "SF040000.001"), but not as the regular glyphs for those code points (e.g., "SF040000"); changing the glyph names to remove the ".001" should fix this.

Hm, after playing with FontForge, this issue may be more complicated than I thought at first. I've tried remapping them to the correct characters, but as soon as I regenerate and reopen the font, they're no longer mapped. This is quite bizarre.

Here's my attempted FontForge script to try to fix this, for anyone else who wants to take a look at this to troubleshoot it.

::slaps head:: Ah, found the bug in my script-- I have to reencode the font in Unicode order before saving it in order for it to 'stick'. Here's a fixed version of the script.

An even better patch that leaves the alternates in place for SF540000 and SF530000. Original version of the script overwrote those characters with their alternate forms.

Slightly improved version of the script:
* Walks through all .ttf files, in case filenames are changed in later betas.
* Sets the widths of all characters to 500 so that the font is properly marked as monospaced-- I noticed that the 'fixed' font wasn't properly identified by some apps that required a monospaced font.
* Added an option "-a" to autohint the fonts while regenerating them.

Hello Cody, you've been busy!

The background to the box drawing characters is from Bug #724022: ("Wishlist: Enable use of Ubuntu Mono as .psf console-setup font"). Plan was/is to make it really easy for people to get the leading/spacing/tiling of the character cells by adding the ANSI eleven box drawing characters and the four full-blocks. These are the characters that it's people are going to find in existing applications in their now workflow (thus avoiding needing to ask testers to copy-and-paste anything special or run anything strange).

It /is/ still possible to get the tiling/alignment in Unicode terminals (with more than the basic ANSI codepoints) by using the double box drawing characters mapped at ╠═╦╬╩═╣ and copying-and-pasting. But, the cunning plan to improve people's ease-of-testing in various environments by supplying the glyphs that the terminals in question already use somewhat failed. My apologies for that.

Your work on the script is excellent. I'll try and upload a patched versions of the Monospaces with those glyph remapped for easier testing.

I've just rewritten the script using FontTools, because I really need a life. :) See attached, and feel free to adapt this as needed.

2011-09-22 (Paul Sladen) Ubuntu Font Family version 0.80

  [Vincent Connare/Dalton Maag]
  * Wish for addition of a monospaced member to the family (LP: #640382)
  * Mono: No hinting yet - Ubuntu Beta Mono font looks jagged in
    Netbeans and terrible with ClearType (LP: #820493)
  * Emacs: choosing normal monospace font in Emacs but gives bold-italic
    (LP: #791076)
  * PUA: ensure that Ubuntu Circle of Friends logo is full size: (LP: #853855)
    + U+E0FF becomes large size in proportionals, remains small width in
      monospaces
    + U+F0FF becomes small size (proportionals only)
    + U+F200 is full ubuntu logomark (proportionals only)

  [Paul Sladen]
  * Monospace: Patch Family Name to be "Ubuntu Mono"
  * Monospace: Patch U+EFFD version debugging glyph to be '0.8'

  [Cody Boisclair]
  * Monospace: Force .null HDMX advance to 500
  * Monospace: Remap ASCII box-drawing characters (LP: #788757)

  [Júlio Reis]
  * Date corrections to 'FONTLOG' (LP: #836595)

I have version 0.80-0ubuntu1~medium installed and the box-drawing characters are still not aligned or joining in either gnome-terminal or gedit. I'd like to see this fixed, but don't know what I can do to help. I don't even know if the problem is this package or those apps.