The default font used for Qt4 is broken (regarding Cyrillic text) [regression, 10.04 to 12.04)

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

Duplicates of this bug: bug 974506, bug 990635.

It appears it's the Bitstream Vera Sans font that is broken.

Julius: Thank you for the long bug. We've known for a while that the Ubuntu Cyrillic could do with a little more work, it has been very hard to get native Cyrillic readers (the people most able to get it fixed) to say definitively what could be improved:

> Cyrillic characters should not look out of place among Latin characters.

Which Cyrillic characters look out of place. (Thanks to some feedback from the Serbian community we dealt with several of the Serbian Cyrillic-specific characters, see bug #708578. This are /fixed/ but not yet shipped. They will hopefully be SRUed when available and tested to people's happiness).

Julius: (mid-air collision). Please could you attach some screenshots showing exactly what you're seeing so that we can both investigate more thoroughly. For debugging the Ubuntu Font Family we also have a couple of magic debugging characters '' and '' . Please could you copy and _paste_ these in if possible as they will show the version number and the hinting state.

If this is the Kubuntu 12.04 installer, it could be: bug #974506.

I'm about to leave here, but I will make some screenshots later today.

I would not say that Cyrillic needs more attention in the sense that on Lucid everything worked perfectly fine. I will make a shot in Lucid (including those characters) and a shot in Precise and you will see everything looking identical except for the Cyrillic fonts that suddenly became out of place. It should not be hard to see it because the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets have many identical characters. For example А and A should look identical. Same with О and O. Currently they do not in Qt4 applications in Precise, in Lucid they did.

I'm not a native reader, but I am quite familiar with Russian and Ukrainian.

Надеюсь эта неполадка вскоре будет устранена :)

This screenshot shows the same file displayed both in Lucid and in Precise.

The output in Lucid looks perfect, in Precise it does not work properly. The lines that should look pretty much identical and which do look identical in Lucid, look different in Precise. There are problem with the font rendering and the spacing.

Looks like Naum-Gothic font is used by default. Removing 'fonts-nanum' package solved the issue for me.

Hello, I'm going to mark this as "Invalid" for ubuntu-font-family-sources. There is obvious an issue, but it's not with the Ubuntu Font Family; none of the fonts shown in Julius' screenshot from comment #9:

  https://launchpadlibrarian.net/103620378/cyrillic_lucid_precise.png

are Ubuntu or Ubuntu Mono. So, somewhere, a font, or font-rendering is changing, but not AFAICT because of UFF.

Marking as dup of bug #990635 as that has made the most progress with debugging. Krill reckons it is related to 'fonts-nanum' and probably a configuration in '/etc/fonts'; in which case we need to work out the before and after situations.