Font line height issues after dist-upgrade #111

Today i had upgraded my system from Devuan 2 To Devuan 4 and now every fontrendering is somewhat messed up. I don't know if it is an issue with the fontrendering of Trinity (but i guess, it is not, because even dmenu is affected), but if it's not, then something is superseding Trinity's font rendering settings too, which should not really happen.

Illustration:
http://oscomp.hu/epicz/lineheight/xroot_old.png
http://oscomp.hu/epicz/lineheight/xroot_new.png
http://oscomp.hu/epicz/lineheight/xmousepad_old.png
http://oscomp.hu/epicz/lineheight/xmousepad_new.png

I use the same fonts, with the same settings, yet the lineheight is different, higher.

Any tips on this?

I remember that at some ugrade I also observed that there was an enlargement in line spacing. However, I welcomed it.

I think it is some repair in freetype library. Before the upgrade, I observed that there was incorrectly calculated line spacing so that the characters underscores _ were redrawn by the background of the characters of the following line – the underscores characters became invisible. The problem was also concerned with characters that have a drawing under the base line – like y, j, g, q. After the upgrade there, the line spacing is calculated correctly and the lines do not overlap. Of course, it was reflected in the height of lines.

It is possible that the same thing happened to you now.

I also observed the same phenomenon after some OS upgrades (no TDE upgrades) and usually I didn't welcomed it becaused it messed up what I was accustomed too :-)

Yes, surely, it was unpleasant that I had to adjust the size of some windows – especially the Konsole. But the problem with invisible underscores, for example, when writing mails in KMail, was very annoying. So the positives were over the negatives. That's why I welcomed it 😉

@SlavekB:

I did not encountered the problems you've mentioned. However, now i encounter that my workspace has been messed up, just like MicheleC's, because texts which fitted before in certain heights, now do not fit in there. (For instance my CPU stats on Kicker.)
Also, if you look the pictures on the mousepad links, then you can see the glitches of the underlinings before the key letters on the new one. So, if this was a freetype bugfix, then with the fix, they broke another thing... (And who knows how many others too.)

But thanks for pinpointing the root of the problem at the freetype library, now i know where to search (and complain, hehe).

Also i think this case can be closed as invalid, as it has nothing to do with TDE; sorry for that, but thanks for the help.

Also i think this case can be closed as invalid, as it has nothing to do with TDE; sorry for that, but thanks for the help.

No worries. Issue closed.

Footnote: It's a freetype issue as SlavekB said and the only method to reverse this is patching by hand...
Details: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freetype/freetype/-/issues/1203

Thanks for the note

Now, this is interesting.

I've downloaded the sources and patches from Debian's page, applied the patches and the "lineheight-reverser" patch, compiled it and then simply replaced /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so.6.17.4 with the resulting library (after a backup of course).

The results:
Qt applications (TQt, Qt4, Qt5) are now "fixed". dmenu too.
GTK applications (GTK2, GTK3) are still working as if nothing would happened.

Edit: Correction: GTK applications are "half-fixed"; menus/buttons are OK, but for instance: Mousepad's textarea still has increased lineheight, as Synaptic's list's...