Fallback fonts not sized properly

[UtkarshVerma]

I have an alias in my ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.xml like this:

    <alias>
        <family>monospace</family>
        <prefer>
            <family>Comic Code Ligatures</family>
            <family>Symbols Nerd Font</family>
        </prefer>
    </alias>

This is simply setting Nerd Font symbols as a fallback in case the glyphs aren't found in my main monospace font, i.e. Comic Code Ligatures.

This works properly in st, however, dwm fails to size the fallback font properly and the glyphs are rendered very small.

Here are a few screenshots.

static const char *fonts[] = { "monospace-12", "Symbols Nerd Font-14" };

static const char *fonts[] = { "monospace-12" };

These is the output of st using the same font family without FONT2 patch:

If you want to test this quickly, you can use my builds of st, dwm and my fontconfig:

• https://github.com/UtkarshVerma/dwm
• https://github.com/UtkarshVerma/st-flexipatch
• https://github.com/UtkarshVerma/dotfiles/

[bakkeby]

I don't think that this would be the responsibility of dwm to figure out. If it needs to look up additional fonts then it will just use the same size as for the primary font, and not all fonts are created alike, like some fonts have space around the characters while other does not. Specifying the font size using pixel size rather than size may also make a difference.

There is also #255 where the monospaced version of the nerd font has small icons compared to the non-monospaced version of the font.

[UtkarshVerma]

Yeah, using pixelsize did make a difference, but the vertical alignment got messed up.

static const char *fonts[] = { "monospace:pixelsize=20" };

This seems really weird.

[bakkeby]

Hi @UtkarshVerma,

I don't know if you still use dwm, but did you ever get to the bottom of this issue?

There was a thread recently on the hackers mailing list that sounds like it may be related to the vertical alignment that you mentioned.
https://lists.suckless.org/hackers/2605/19660.html

Something else that came to mind is that with font compilations like Nerd Font and Font Awesome there were also size discrepancies between the monospaced vs non-monospaced versions of the font, like icons may be very small in the monospaced font compared to the other (as far as I can remember).

Thanks,

-Stein

[UtkarshVerma]

You're reaching out to me at an interesting time. I switched my machine a couple of months back to Asahi Linux which doesn't support X11 well. So I am not using dwm at the moment. Regarding the vertical alignment issue, I don't remember how I fixed it, if at all. Skimming through my dotfiles and dwm build, I don't think I did anything special. There is a possibility I might have just learned to live with it.