[Devel] Trimmed monospace font: bug, feature or my fault?

[Stepan Roh]

Hello.

Problem:

I have monospaced TrueType (indicated with Panose setting, all widths are
the same) font based on Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. When shown in some GTK+
or KDE/Qt (I got reports of other toolkits behaving the same too)
application the glyphs are trimmed (maybe cut is better word) to their
width. Non-monospaced fonts are not trimmed. It is best shown on
monospaced Oblique font face - even the original Bitstream font - for
example M is cut a bit in the upper right corner and lower left corner.

Now the strange part comes: when transformation matrix is set to some
non-identity (like (1, 0.0001, 0, 1) which is visually the same as
identity) the trimming stops. I'm setting the matrix in fontconfig.

I guess that this behaviour is caused by freetype (different toolkits,
same behaviour), but I don't know if it is a bug or feature. I tried to
find any indication why it should trim monospaced fonts or why
transformation should not trim them, but I had no success (maybe I'm just
missing something). Thanks for explanation.

I have freetype 2.1.4 from XFree86 4.4.0.

I'm not subscribed so please CC me, thanks.

Have a nice day.

Stepan Roh