awesome icons broken after ttf-font-awesome update on Arch

Question

awesome icons broken after ttf-font-awesome update on Arch

eguiraud opened this issue 6 years ago · comments

As per the pacman logs below, ttf-font-awesome was updated by pacman on the 29th of December,
which resulted in i3status-rust looking like this:

As you can see icons do not display properly anymore. removing i3status-rust-git and re-installing from AUR did not fix the issue.

Relevant snippet of pacman logs:

[2017-12-29 17:12] [PACMAN] Running 'pacman -Syu'                                                                       
[2017-12-29 17:12] [PACMAN] synchronizing package lists                                                                 
[2017-12-29 17:13] [PACMAN] starting full system upgrade                                                                
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] transaction started                                                                           
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] upgraded docker (1:17.11.0-1 -> 1:17.12.0-1)                                                  
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] upgraded mesa (17.3.0-2 -> 17.3.1-2)                                                          
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] upgraded firefox (57.0.2-1 -> 57.0.3-1)                                                       
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] upgraded lib32-mesa (17.3.0-2 -> 17.3.1-2)                                                    
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] upgraded numactl (2.0.11-1 -> 2.0.11-2)                                                       
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] upgraded ttf-font-awesome (4.7.0-5 -> 5.0.2-1)                                                
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] upgraded xorg-server-common (1.19.5-1 -> 1.19.6-2)                                            
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] upgraded xorg-server (1.19.5-1 -> 1.19.6-2)                                                   
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] transaction completed                                                                         
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] running 'fontconfig.hook'...                                                                  
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] running 'gtk-update-icon-cache.hook'...                                                       
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] running 'systemd-sysusers.hook'...                                                            
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] running 'systemd-update.hook'...                                                              
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] running 'update-desktop-database.hook'...                                                     
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] running 'xorg-mkfontdir.hook'...

Aaron Jacobs · Answer 1 · Tue Jan 02 2018 23:39:19 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

This is due to the fact that version 4 and 5 of ttf-font-awesome are incompatible (see e.g. this issue for problems related to polybar). Try modifying your i3 config's font settings. If that doesn't work, my recommendation for now is to downgrade or use ttf-font-awesome-4 from the AUR. That's what I'm doing at the moment, and it works just fine.

Enrico Guiraud · Answer 2 · Wed Jan 03 2018 08:35:29 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Thank you for the quick response! If I understand correctly:

there is no plan to migrate i3status-rust to the new version of ttf-font-awesome
I should configure the bar to use ttf-font-awesome-4 from the AUR instead

I am unsure what you mean with "try modifying your i3 config's font settings. Currently it's
font pango:DejaVu Sans Mono, Awesome 15
but I don't know how to switch it to version 4 -- any idea? 😅

EDIT:
can confirm that the following one-liner solves the issue, if uninstalling ttf-font-awesome is an option:
sudo pacman -Rns ttf-font-awesome && pacaur -S ttf-font-awesome-4

Aaron Jacobs · Answer 3 · Wed Jan 03 2018 12:24:44 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Since this is a font issue, it should be possible to modify your i3 config's settings to use the new font, e.g.

# with ttf-font-awesome-4:
font pango:DejaVu Sans Mono, FontAwesome 15
# with ttf-font-awesome:
font pango:DejaVu Sans Mono, FontAwesome5Free, FontAwesome5Brands 15

(You can see in the output of fc-list | grep Awesome that the name of the font has changed in version 5.) However, this doesn't actually work for me. I still get the same missing character artifacts.

This might be related to the fact that this Font Awesome does not have a blank space glyph, which was an issue for the Siji font at some point, although I'm really just guessing now.

I'll continue to recommend downgrading. There is some relevant discussion on Reddit as well.

I'm not sure this is actually a problem with i3status-rust, since we can't modify any of our code to fix external font problems, but I'll leave the issue open for now. I'll very welcome to suggestions.

Enrico Guiraud · Answer 4 · Fri Jan 05 2018 23:33:19 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I'm not sure this is actually a problem with i3status-rust, since we can't modify any of our code to fix external font problems, but I'll leave the issue open for now. I'll very welcome to suggestions.

That is fair, but at least the dependency should be changed to ttf-font-awesome-4 -- probably inform the AUR package maintainer if there is one.

Aaron Jacobs · Answer 5 · Mon Jan 08 2018 11:29:27 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

There's now some mention of this in the project README. I have no idea who is maintaining the AUR package, but perhaps @greshake will know.

mmetak · Answer 6 · Mon Jan 08 2018 21:00:13 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Hi, i3status-rust-git maintainer here. I've updated the font name in aur.

@bluehood
Latest font awesome 5 doesn't conflict with previous version 4 so there's no need to remove ttf-awesome.
File names are different and their font names are also different. Not sure why package in AUR has conflicts?

Enrico Guiraud · Answer 7 · Mon Jan 08 2018 21:06:56 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

@mmetak thank you for the quick reply!
I did not experience any conflicts, the problem is that i3status-rust does not support ttf-font-awesome anymore, only ttf-font-awesome-4

Aaron Jacobs · Answer 8 · Mon Jan 08 2018 21:30:35 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

@mmetak Hijacking this a little, but I'll also point out that i3status-rust runs just fine under sway, so if you can indicate that the sway package satisfies the i3 dependency that would be appreciated as well 😄

mmetak · Answer 9 · Mon Jan 08 2018 21:52:12 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

EDIT:
can confirm that the following one-liner solves the issue, if uninstalling ttf-font-awesome is an option:
sudo pacman -Rns ttf-font-awesome && pacaur -S ttf-font-awesome-4

I was reffering to this part that you wrote. ttf-font-awesome-4 package in AUR has conflicts=('ttf-font-awesome') when it doesn't conflict.
They both have different file and font names so you can install them both at the same time, only have to adjust config file with proper names as @atheriel pointed out above.

@atheriel
I just dropped i3-wm from depends and updated description to indicate that you can use it with i3bar or swaybar. That seems like simplest solution?

Enrico Guiraud · Answer 10 · Mon Jan 08 2018 22:10:37 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

@mmetak I see now, thanks! I went to the ttf-font-awesome-4 aur page to comment and saw that you already did :)

However I am not sure how i3 could decide which of the two icons to use if both packages were installed: the only line I have in my i3/config relative to font-awesome, which works for both version 4 and 5, is font pango:DejaVu Sans Mono, Awesome 15

mmetak · Answer 11 · Mon Jan 08 2018 22:26:47 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

@bluehood

$ fc-list | grep Awesome
/usr/share/fonts/TTF/fa-regular-400.ttf: Font Awesome 5 Free:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/TTF/fontawesome-webfont.ttf: FontAwesome:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/TTF/fa-solid-900.ttf: Font Awesome 5 Free:style=Solid
/usr/share/fonts/TTF/fa-brands-400.ttf: Font Awesome 5 Brands:style=Regular

I use font pango:FontAwesome for version 4 of font awesome and font pango:Font Awesome 5 Free for
when I want version 5.

Enrico Guiraud · Answer 12 · Mon Jan 08 2018 22:29:55 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

fair enough :) as you can see I am very clumsy with fonts, sorry 😅

Aaron Jacobs · Answer 13 · Mon Jan 08 2018 22:58:05 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

It sounds like we should report this lack of conflict upstream to the ttf-font-awesome-4 package, IMO.

@mmetak That works nicely, thank you.

Enrico Guiraud · Answer 14 · Tue Jan 09 2018 16:13:46 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

@atheriel it was reported here in the comments.

For what concerns me this issue can be closed: using ttf-font-awesome-4 solves the problem with the icons, and both the README and the AUR package now report ttf-font-awesome-4 as the optional dependency to get fancy icons :)

Ryan Boehning · Answer 15 · Sat Apr 07 2018 07:11:04 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I'm using otf-font-awesome, which is Font Awesome 5.0.9. Everything looks fine except the CPU icon is one of those weird glyphs.

Also, I don't think this issue should be closed. i3status should be updated to work with the latest Font Awesome.

i3status-rs version: 0.9

Aaron Jacobs · Answer 16 · Sun Apr 15 2018 06:58:52 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I think insofar as we need to update the Unicode points used by the glyphs, that's probably true. I supported closing the issue primarily because this seemed to be more related to font specification in the i3 config than anything else. If we can isolate glyphs that have changed we should be able to make those changes relatively easily.

In the meantime you can change the icon used for the CPU in your config -- please let me know if that works.

mukund · Answer 17 · Thu Jun 28 2018 16:32:09 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

In my case, the separator glyphs were bugging out because they require powerline-fonts by default. Solve by either installing powerline-fonts or change theme.overrides.separator

Before

After installing powerline-fonts

Bernardo Meurer · Answer 18 · Mon Dec 10 2018 15:05:29 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I also don't think this should be closed, upgrading to using FontAwesome5 should at least be on the roadmap.

Aaron Jacobs · Answer 19 · Thu Dec 13 2018 12:45:34 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

@bemeurer What aspect of FontAwesome5 do we not support?

Bernardo Meurer · Answer 20 · Fri Dec 14 2018 06:04:28 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

This is what my bar looks on Sway HEAD with the latest fontawesome (5.1.0) on Gentoo.

This is what it looks with fontawesome 4.7.0

Some icons are missing on both, namely volume and brightness, but I think it's clear that with 5.1.0 it seems to work very poorly, font-wise.

Aaron Jacobs · Answer 21 · Fri Dec 14 2018 06:21:26 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

We will need a list of glyphs than have had their unicode value changed between version 4 and 5.

Fuan · Answer 22 · Fri Jan 18 2019 21:10:28 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

This was reported here to be a problem with pango.

Bug reports here, and here.

Aaron Jacobs · Answer 23 · Sat Jan 19 2019 16:02:37 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Thanks for tracking that down, @glubsy.

Viktor Rudnev · Answer 24 · Fri Feb 08 2019 08:24:26 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I think I found a workaround.

If a character doesn't belong to control, format, surrogate, or space separator categories, pango treats it like a normal symbol. That means, if it is invisible, we can safely mix it with whitespaces.

For example, there's one such symbol that works with current ttf-font-awesome: '\u{034f}' (COMBINING GRAPHEME JOINER). If you add one before the white space, the 0020 box goes away.

Grayson Earle · Answer 25 · Sun Mar 14 2021 00:05:58 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

still broken

Max Verevkin · Answer 26 · Sun Mar 14 2021 00:31:04 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

@prismspecs What's broken?

Jason Nader · Answer 27 · Sun Mar 14 2021 11:21:49 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I assume using "awesome" instead of "awesome5" in the i3status-rust config